December 25th-How did December 25th get chosen as the birthdate of Jesus and why do we celebrate Christmas?

Q: I heard that Jesus wasn't born on December 25th because the bible says nothing about when he was born, I wanna know how did December 25th get chosen as Jesus birthdate and why do we celebrate Christmas on that day ir he was not born on that day, I LOVE Christmas trees they give me a warm feeling and remind me of how blessed I am to be alive, I love helping decorate the tree every year after Thanksgiving, I love walking through malls seeing the beautifully decorated trees on display and I love the music they play while you shop, I also make my own Christmas ornaments, I color them with colored pencils, glitter glue and I hang them up in my room, I also wrap empty boxes with wrapping paper, you know like the box ice cream bars come in, instead of throwing it away, that is my way of recycleing it, by wrapping it in beautiful wrappin paper and putting each box outside my room door on each side of my door, I plan to make 100 more decorations before the day after Thanksging gets here. do you know people around the world that celebrate Christmas on my birthday which is January 19th I was born 25 days after Christmas, 25 is my other lucky number.

A: Noone knows for certain precisely when or why Dec 25th was chosen as the day to celebrate Christ's birthday because it all happened at least 1700 years ago. We do know it was chosen sometime in the 3rd or very early 4th century because there is an early 4th century calendar which mentions it. We know it was first adopted in Rome. There is evidence it was first suggested in the early 3rd century. We do know it is nothing to do with Yule. Yule is the word for winter in Anglo Saxon and they only converted to Christianity in the middle ages - over 800 years after the date was chosen for Christmas. There is no historical evidence that Yule was ever a religious festival. We do know it was not a Solstice festival as the Romans did not traditionally celebrate the solstice and Christmas was set 3 days after the solstice in any case. Saturnalia, which occurred around the solstice time (17th-22nd Dec) was dedicated to the god Saturn, not the solstice. We do know it was not, at the time, a traditional Roman festival though a Roman Emperor did inaugurate a feast on Dec 25th in the late 3rd century - about the same time that Christians adopted it for Christmas. So, either Christians took on the emperors idea - which would be odd because all the Christian literature of the time attacks the adoption of pagan practices - or the Emperor was trying to subvert Christianity. We will probably never know for sure which.

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