Christmas: Is it about religion?

From Why Believe in God:

The holiday season comes from the winter solstice, the first day of winter, which is the shortest day of the year. Usually falling on December 21st, it has been celebrated in the northern hemisphere since prehistoric times. It was marked as the beginning of “the return of the sun” because, after that, the days start getting longer.

The ancient Romans held their festival of Saturnalia, the feast of Saturn, at this time. It featured wild parties, gift giving, and halls decked with laurel. However, they miscalculated the solstice date, seeing it as falling variously on December 23rd to 25th.

When Roman Catholicism replaced ancient polytheism, the Church found it practical to adopt the old Roman holiday, renaming it Christ’s Mass. But this popular move, made in the third century, didn’t meet with complete approval. Christians in the Middle East viewed their European brethren as idolaters and sun worshippers for repackaging this pagan festival as the birthday of Jesus.

As Christianity spread across Europe, the various “barbarian” cultures added their own pre-Christian solstice practices to Christmas. Thus the evergreen tree was introduced by Germanic peoples; holly and mistletoe, sacred to the Druids, came from the Celts; and the Yule log and caroling were provided by the Anglo-Saxons.

But some Christians condemned these trappings, especially the Christmas tree, citing Jeremiah 10:1-5 in the Bible: “Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen . . . for one cutteth a tree out of the forest. . . . They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.”

In the early American colonies, most Protestants wouldn’t celebrate Christmas, viewing it as a Catholic holiday. This was why George Washington’s largely Protestant troops didn’t object to crossing the Delaware on Christmas night to attack the Catholic Hessians the next morning. It was just another day to them.

Only in the 1800s did the holiday begin to gain wider acceptance. Northern European customs were introduced into the United States by the flow of immigrants. So numerous individuals set out deliberately to fashion a secular celebration of the season that would be acceptable to Protestants.

American cartoonist Thomas Nast created the secular Santa Claus out of the varied European “Old Man Winter” folk images (having their roots in the Norse god Odin). Some fabled attributes of the Catholic Saint Nicholas were added. As for the colors of Santa’s suit, they were quite varied until codified in the twentieth century by Coca Cola through its advertising.

So yeah, thank you http://www.humanlight.org/