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For all of you, Christmas as we know it today is less than 200 years old.
The way it was celebrated up until the second quarter of the 19th century was in revelry and drunken debauchery. Much more like Carnival.
So, who changed it and why was it changed?
The Victorian Age.
The youth still gets wasted, here, guys. Probably more than in the past.
The real difference is that before the westernization, nobody really cared about Christmas; orthodox christians are more fond of the Easter.
Well the Victorians had a big influence on it, for sure. Maybe it was just a moral backlash of the age.
But several things may point to it being a case of the haves shorting and redirecting the have-nots.
Christmas has always been a Pagan Celebrations that the Christian Church hooked onto to at least get a little church attendance out of.
No one is quite sure when Christ was born. Several dates are best guesses but Dec.25th is not one of them. It helped the Church and made the people feel a little less guilty for continuing to celebrate.
Who knows how far back a midwinter festival goes. I think that it was not until the latter part of the 5th century that we find any Christians celebrating the birth of Christ associated with the midwinter holidays.
Coca Cola
It is a thin layer of christianity smeared over traditions that are thousands of years old. The summer and winter solstices have always been celebrated, as have been the two equinoxes. They were celebarted from Sumeria and ancient Egypt to the pre-saxon invasion celtic kingdoms in the british isles and their druids.
Modern day christmas (the westernized version of it at least) is all about consumerism. Buy more useless crap you don't need and also give money to charities once per year to feel good about yourself while you spend 100 x that amount on vane and vapid items.
It all stems from new Babylon itself - the promised land of consumerism and debt, the USA. It's particularly pathetic the way the christmas carols start playing on the radio on the very next day after Thanksgiving. The festive holiday where they celebrate the slaughtering of the indigenous american population by stuffing themselves with turkey.
Before that we have halloween - a truly pagan holiday celebrated by creating effigies and stuffing the children up with sweets. They don't bake them after they make them nice and plump, do they?
Well, Myth, all I did on Christmas day was go to Church, cook a Pork chop with mashed potato, eat some cake and drink two bottles of Cider.
As far as "modern" Christmas goes, Christmas in Britain was relatively sedate until the Victorian Age. The Reformation and the aftermath of the "Glorious Republic" almost stamped it out entirely but in general it was a holiday celebrated just the same as other Saint's days.
However, modern Christmas is the result of Victorian mass media, Christmas trees came in with Prince Albert and Charles Dickens virtually "invented" the family Christmas by portraying a view of Christmas and a Christmas experience that was at once appealing and entirely constructed.
As to the date, the Saturnalia is celebrated on the 23rd (the actual Solstice in the Roman Calendar). The Romans had also commercialised the holiday even before Christianity was widespread, we know this from Seneca's letters. I would suppose that the 24th was chosen as the day after the saturnalia - so whilst it doesn't actually supplant the Pagan festival it can co-opt the celebration, you just have to get people to wait a day.
That's an important point, btw. Christmas is the 24th, not the 25th, Jesus was born in the night, and this is usually interpreted as being before midnight. In any case, the traditional day begins with the dawn rather than at midnight.