There is little historical evidence that can trace the origins of Christmas back to any particular Pagan festival or its customs. Saturnalia has no clear link at all, being a festival that preceded the midwinter solstice. It was held on 17th December, and the celebrations never lasted more than seven days, to the 24th December. If the Christians had been interested in appropriating Saturnalia, then they would have surely used the correct date. And there is no contemporary evidence that a pagan festival of Yule was even celebrated.

The closest link that can be argued is the supposed link between the date of December 25th and the birthday of the Unconquered Son. In the late fourth century the Scriptor Syrus wrote that: “It was a custom of the pagans to celebrate on the same 25 December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and revelries the Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day.”

However, despite this late account, we know that the Festival of the Unconquered Son did not actually take place on December 25th. The Cult itself was not ancient, but had been invented by Emperor Aurelian in 274 as a syncretic state cult, in order to unify the Empire. It was based on an older Syrian cult, which had celebrated its annual festival in late-October. Aurelian’s new Festival was supposed to be held every four years and was celebrated with games in mid-October. (Aurelian’s Sol Invictus Cult didn’t even last 50 years, being abolished by Constantine in 324.)

We do not know then why this anonymous writer, over fifty years after the abolition of the festival, made his claim that a Nativity of Sol Invictus was held on the December 25th. Perhaps this was some other feast that he mistook, or there was another private informal celebration for Sol Invictus held in midwinter as well as the main games in October. Or perhaps, being a Syrian, he was only guessing at what had happened in Rome and that he was merely mistaken. Historians can only guess.

Why indeed the early Church would have been interested in appropriating a Pagan festival is a mystery also. The early Church, to the contrary, made great efforts to distinguish their sect from any pagan associations. Even the fact that December 25th was so close to midwinter was problematic for the early Church, and several Fathers such as Augustine and Leo the Great felt the need to write to remind believers not to confuse the Feast of Christ’s Nativity with sun worship.

Although commentators will sometimes acknowledge that the Christian Feast of the Nativity did not appropriate Saturnalia’s date, there remains the claims that the Church appropriated their celebratory traditions and rites. However, this again has little historical support. Saturnalia was a time of raucous partying, gambling, and the turning on its head of social roles and propriety. Slaves would be waited on by their masters, and peers would choose a “king” to rule over them and order silly party pranks, such as dancing naked or speaking disgracefully (Lucian, Saturnalia, 4). This was a far cry from the piety of early Christian celebrations, which would not countenance such behaviour. The Christian Festival was celebrated with the attendance of religious services during the day, a very serious affair. And while the strict fast of the preceding days was broken with a banquet, there was no tradition of such impious behaviour.

What then of Anglo-Saxon festivities? The cycles from Ireland and Wales are unhelpful, written too long after Christianisation, and containing absolutely no indication of any solar worship altogether. Bede, as always, provides his own helpful speculation on the pagan past he had such scanty historical knowledge of. He wrote in 730, after Christinisation, and stated that the most important annual festival of the English had formerly been what they called the Modranicht, or ‘Mother Night’, on 24 December. This was the night of their new year, and they observed it with (unspecified) religious rites. However, this was thoroughly critiqued by Alexander Tille in 1889 who pointed out that Bede’s knowledge of his people’s pagan past was scanty at best, which Bede himself admitted. Tille suggested that Bede simply mistook Mother Night for a celebration of the Virgin Mary. This “Modranicht” indeed is entirely absent from any other historical source, either from England or the Continent.

The Yule connection is late, and merely a change of name. In Anglo-Saxon Literature they knew the festival by their own name, usually calling it “middum wintra” and rarely its ecclesiastical name of “Nativited”. This changed in the 11th Century when, from 1038 we hear of it being called “Cristes Maessan” for the first time. And With the conquest of England by the Danish they brought their own name for the festival, “Yule”. Yet what this name originally meant, or what it was attached to, is a mystery.

What we know is that the earliest Scandanavian literature does not mention Yule, but rather to a pagan festival called the “Winter Nights”, which was an October festival. However, several centuries after Scandanavia had been Christianised; in the 13th century Snorri Sturlson wrote that Yule was the name of a pagan midwinter festival. Snorri of course has the same problem as Bede, but more so, in that his knowledge of ancient pagan practices was extremely limited. Snorri wrote that the pagan custom was to sacrifice during the Winter Nights for a good crop at Yule. He said that the Festival of Yule lasted three nights, from Midwinter to New Year, and that a Christian ruler of Norway, Hakon the Good, had made this synchronize with the Nativity. His understanding of Yule was that it was a time of peace, during which no violence or combat could take place. We should be wary of trusting Snorri’s claims completely however.

Furthermore, as I said above, rather than appropriating pagan customs, Christian leaders were vociferous in their denunciations of them. From the fourth century to the eleventh century we know of forty separate denunciations of continuing pagan practices, condemning popular pagan midwinter and new year customs such as divination and magic. The Pagan customs that continued however were most commonly associated with New Year celebrations, being carried out largely on 31st December and 1st January. We can see that far from appropriating pagan customs, the Church was far more interested in condemning them. And although the Church was unsuccessful and these New Year’s customs continued, they were never appropriated or approved of by the Church.

The best that can be said for the appropriation of customs is that the Romans gave out gifts of candles, and decorated their temples with foliage. Indeed decorating one’s home with the flowers and foliage of the season is extremely common all over the world, and this was no different in Europe. Europeans filled their homes with holly, ivy, bay, laurel, rosemary, and broom at Christmas just as they filled their homes with other plant-life at other times. This was given no Christian significance, and was sometimes denounced by the Church as antithetical to proper religious observance, though most local clerics and churchwardens had no problem with it. Even the Protestants found little to condemn about it.

However, it is hard to find any evidence that this use of foliage had any pagan religious significance. It appears to have been considered merely generic decoration, suitable for any celebration. And while candles and gift-giving do have an association with Christmas, the concept of candles and giving gifts is also so generic it is hard to say with certainty that they are definitely a pagan appropriation. After all, lighting candles is normal human behaviour during times of darkness, and gift-giving is quite standard during times of celebration.

The seemingly pagan “fertility rite” of the kissing bough actually has no evidence of pagan origin. Mistletoe was a late addition to Christmas foliage, being only first recorded in England in the 1620’s when England was firmly Christian. And at first this was merely hung up, and was not used for kissing under. The origin of the “kissing bough” can only be traced back to the late 18th century. It was Washington Irving, writing in 1819, who first suggested that it was a pagan plant, beloved of druids. There is no historical evidence that the choice of mistletoe for the kissing bough ever originally had any deeper significance. Speculation of some supposed pagan origins is therefore far less likely than the alternative; that it is rare, and so would have made the bough more impressive, compared to boughs made of other plants.

And again, with the seemingly pagan “Yule Log”, historians struggle to find any evidence for pagan origin. The suggestion that it had these associations was first made in 1725 by Henry Bourne, who had no evidence for this speculation, and romantic folklorists of the nineteenth century such as James Frazer eagerly repeated this as fact. Speculation of ancient pagan origins have to compete with Occams razor; that a large source of fuel was needed so as to be sufficient to burn throughout the day, without requiring anyone to work to tend or refuel the fire when they’d rather be celebrating. Indeed there is no mention of a special Yule Log in England before 1600 and the earliest reference that can be found for it anywhere is in Germany in 1184, long after Christianisation. The multiplicity of folk superstitions that surround the Yule Log are different in different localities, suggesting that these have each been grafted onto it later, rather than coming from a shared ancient source.

Source: Ronald Hutton: The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain