[Lady Valkyrie]

December 25th
The Bible does not tell us the precise date of Christ's birth or even the time of year when He was born. It was, however, unlikely to have been winter, as the shepherds of Bethlehem "were feeding their flocks by night in the open fields." The cold of the night, from December to February, is very piercing, and it was not the custom for the shepherds of Judea to watch their flocks in the open fields later than about the end of October.

December 25th was, among the pagans, a day of celebration in honor of various gods. For the Babylonians, it was a celebration of the birth of the son of the Babylonian queen of heaven. For the Egyptians, it was a celebration of the birth of the son of Isis. For the Romans, it was the Winter solstice, the celebration of the birthday of the sun (Constantine was a member of the sun-cult before "converting" to Christianity). Just a day earlier, on the 24th of December, the Arabs celebrated "The Birthday of the Lord," which was, for them, the moon.The very name by which Christmas is popularly known among ourselves - Yuleday - proves at once its Pagan and Babylonian origin. "Yule" is the Chaldee name for an "infant" or "little child;" and the 25th of December was called by our Pagan Anglo-Saxon ancestors,"Yule-day," or the "Child's day," and the night that preceded it, "Mother-night," long before they came in contact with Christianity Far and wide, in the realms of paganism, was this birth-day observed.

Pagans for centuries had been celebrating December 25th as the birthday of some son or sun. The Christian holiday was not always celebrated on December 25th, however. For the first three hundred years of the current era, there was no festivity of the birth of Jesus. Some churches celebrated Jesus' birthday in the spring time and some celebrated it on January 6 (Epiphany). Early in the fourth century, the Roman church decreed that December 25 would henceforth be recognized as the birthday of Christ. The Eastern churches refused to accept Christmas until 375 C.E., and the churches in Jerusalem rejected the December 25 date until the seventh century. There are still some Eastern Rite churches that continue to celebrate the Epiphany date. The festival of Christmas has always been a controversial one in Christianity. The Puritans banned Christmas altogether and during the Cromwellian period in England, anyone celebrating Christmas was jailed for heresy. Probably the most hated of all Puritan laws was the one abolishing Christmas and probably led to popular acceptance of royalty (nb: the Restoration) -- at least the King allowed the masses to celebrate Yule!

In America, Christmas was generally outlawed until the end of the last century. In Boston, up to 1870, anyone missing work on Christmas Day would be fired. Factory owners customarily required employees to come to work at 5 a.m. on Christmas -- to insure they wouldn't have time to go to church that day. And any student who failed to go to school on December 25 would be expelled. Only the arrival of large numbers of Irish and northern European immigrants brought acceptance of Christmas in this country. Christmas did not even begin to be a legal holiday anywhere in the United States until very late in the nineteenth century CE, with Alabama being the first state to make it so.

Holly
Holly has been used in Christmas tradition for almost two thousand years. It’s older, pagan origins began at least as early as ancient Rome, when holly was associated with Saturn, the sun god. In Druidic and other related pagan traditions, holly leaves were placed around homes in the winter in the belief that the fairies would use it as a shelter against the cold. Early Christians in the British Isles adopted this tradition at first to avoid persecution, but holly was eventually reinterpreted with Christian symbolism. Danielle Wagner tells us that she heard about the Christian symbolism of holly during a sermon. The pointy edges represent the crown of thorns which Christ wore during his crucifixion. The red berries represent Christ's blood which he shed during His torture and death.

Christmas Tree
The Christmas tree, now so common among us, was equally common in Pagan Rome and Pagan Egypt. In Egypt that tree was the palm-tree; in Rome it was the fir; the palm-tree denoting the Pagan Messiah, as Baal-Tamar, the fir referring to him as Baal-Berith. The mother of Adonis, the Sun-God and great mediatorial divinity, was mystically said to have been changed into a tree, and when in that state to have brought forth her divine son. If the mother was a tree, the son must have been recognized as "Man of the branch."

Mistletoe
In Druid tradition, "the mistletoe was regarded as a divine branch - a branch that came from heaven, and grew upon a tree that sprang out of the earth. Thus by the engrafting of the celestial branch into the earthly tree, heaven and earth, that sin had severed, were joined together, and thus the mistletoe bough became the token of Divine reconciliation to man, the kiss being the well-known token of pardon and reconciliation."
Interestingly, even earlier in history, the winter solstice was also celebrated by the followers of Mithra as the "nativity" or "birth" of the sun. Mithra was the Persian sun-god, and his worship was widespread throughout the Roman Empire in the days of the early believers. When the feast was celebrated in Rome, it was called the festival of Saturn and lasted for five days. In both ancient Rome and more ancient Babylon, this festival was characterized by bouts of drunkenness, wild merrymaking, and lascivious orgies which would begin with an "innocent kiss" underneath the mistletoe and would then lead to justification of all sorts of sexual excesses, perversions and abominations.

The Three Wise Men
In Christian tradition, we place the three wise men and the star they followed at the manger scene. We have even given the wise men traditional names--Melchior, Kaspar, and Baltazar. However, the Bible does not tell us the names of the wise men; it does not even tell us how many there were. The presence of the star does serve to announce Christ's birth, but when the wise men finally complete their journey and offer their gifts to Jesus, he is no longer a baby in the manger, but a young child in a house. The biblical account, found only in Matthew 2:9-12

The rest of this informative thread will continue in the following reply because the maximum number of charaters has been used