For thousands of years Sun worshipers have celebrated the Sun god’s rebirth after the winter solstice. Pagans honored the birth of the “invincible sun” with a festival of lights, using big bonfires, pork fat tallow candles and, today, billions of colored lights. Rome’s seven day Saturnalia was religious revelry with decadent drunkenness, outrageous adultery and giving Saturn’s nativity birth gifts to children. The Norse yuletide carousal used sexually soliciting mistletoe, yule-log bonfires and decorated evergreen wreaths and trees.
“Christmas” as we know it is a relatively new phenomenon. Yes, yes, yes, yes, the turning of the season has had celebratory significance since at least Neanderthal, but here in “America” “Christmas” as we know it, the whole shit’n’shaboodle from arguments aye and agin through the crass commercialism to the [snicker] secret of “Santa” himself grew out of a 1930”²s mass marketing campaign – replete with iconic polar bears – to sell Coca Cola. Doesn’t have anything to do with “Christ”.
It’s all about the solstice, the turning of the seasons. Yule!
Christmas was actually outlawed in Massachusetts in the 17th century… by Christians!
These days, the holiday has little to do with Christ or the sun, and everything to do with feeding the corporate capitalist machine.