Christmas

The Nativity of the Lord

December 25; January 7 in churches on the Julian calendar, and January 6 in the Armenian Church

In Stromata I.21 he reports Egyptian scholars working out the day of Christ’s birth, and the dates they reached (one was May 20). This is a record of people calculating a date, not of anyone keeping a feast.

One manuscript of his commentary on Daniel names December 25 as the day of the birth. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes the passage is missing from other manuscripts and treats it as doubtful, and it is widely judged a later insertion. It cannot show a feast this early.

Promotes the cult of the Unconquered Sun. The Roman civil calendar later marks December 25 as Natalis Invicti, the birthday of the Unconquered (Sun). This is the root of the claim that Christmas replaced a pagan feast (see How it began).

Its list of martyrs’ burial days, usually dated to about 336, opens at December 25 with “natus Christus in Betleem Iudeae”: Christ born in Bethlehem of Judea. It is the first surviving record of the day kept for Christ’s birth, at Rome, about three centuries after the church began.

Preaches the feast of the birth in Constantinople, where it is new. The East had marked the birth on January 6, and Jerusalem still did in the 380s.

Preaches at Antioch urging the whole church there to keep December 25, which part of the congregation had kept for at least ten years. He says the West had kept it from the beginning, and conservatives at Antioch had resisted it. The Catholic Encyclopedia dates the sermon “almost certainly” to 386.

Sets up a manger with a live ox and donkey at Greccio for Christmas Mass, and the nativity scene spreads from there. The ox and donkey come from Isaiah 1:3, not from the Gospel accounts.

The appendix to its Directory for the Publick Worship of God says no day but the Lord’s Day is commanded under the gospel, and sets aside the church’s festival days. Days of fasting or thanksgiving may still be called for special occasions.

Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued.

An ordinance abolishes the feasts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun. The Christmas of 1644 had already been kept as a fast, and sources differ over the date of the ban. It ends with the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.

Fines anyone keeping Christmas five shillings. The law is repealed in 1681 under pressure from London.

whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shilling as a fine to the county.

The poem gives the American Santa Claus his sleigh and reindeer. Thomas Nast draws him from 1863, and Haddon Sundblom’s Coca-Cola advertisements from 1931 fix the red suit. The figure began with Nicholas, a 4th-century bishop of Myra, by way of the Dutch Sinterklaas.

Makes Christmas Day a legal holiday. For two centuries before, many businesses and schools in New England stayed open on December 25.

Answering a reader, he gives the position many writers in the Churches of Christ hold: no religious observance of the birth, but liberty to keep December 25 “as a family and national custom” under Romans 14.

My family has never observed it as the birth of Jesus, in fact, I regularly preach against the religious observance of Christmas.

The first Christians kept the Lord’s Day and, by the 2nd century, an annual feast of the resurrection. They did not keep the birth: Irenaeus and Tertullian leave it out of their lists of feasts, and Origen remarks that in Scripture only sinners celebrate their birthdays. By the 4th century Rome kept December 25 (H4), while much of the East marked the birth on January 6, together with Christ’s baptism (H5). The two dates spread into each other’s churches over the next century, and the twelve days between them became one season.

Why December 25? Historians give two answers, below. Andrew McGowan (Biblical Archaeology Society) calls them false alternatives: many Christmas customs plausibly have pagan or folk roots, the greenery and the Yule log among them, even if the date does not. Either way the date comes from the church’s reckoning or the empire’s calendar, not from the text.

The replacement theory

The calculation theory (Duchesne, Talley)

Roman Catholics

Anglicans and Lutherans

Most evangelical and mainline Protestants

Eastern Orthodox on the Revised Julian calendar

Orthodox on the Julian calendar

The Coptic, Ethiopian and Armenian churches

The Seventh-day Adventist Church

Quakers

The Churches of Christ

Strict confessional Presbyterians

Jehovah’s Witnesses

The Churches of God in the Armstrong tradition

Midnight Mass

Catholics celebrate three Masses, at midnight, at dawn and during the day. The midnight Mass is the best known.

The Nativity vigil

The Orthodox keep Vespers and the Liturgy of St. Basil on the eve, then the Nativity Liturgy, ending a 40-day fast that runs from November 15.

Lessons and carols, and candlelight

Anglicans and Lutherans hold a service of nine Bible readings and carols, made famous by King’s College, Cambridge. Many Protestant churches hold a Christmas Eve candlelight service.

Advent

Four Sundays of preparation before Christmas in the Western churches, with a wreath of candles.

The nativity scene

Spread from Francis of Assisi’s manger at Greccio in 1223 (H7). Its ox and donkey come from Isaiah 1:3, and its three kings from later tradition: Matthew names neither the number nor any king.

The Christmas tree

First clearly recorded in the 1500s in Livonia and Strasbourg, most likely from the “paradise tree” of medieval plays about Adam and Eve. It reached English homes after an engraving of Victoria and Albert’s tree in 1848.

Carols

Hymns of the birth from Prudentius in the 4th century on, sung in churches first. Many are now sung in shops and on the radio as much as in worship.

Gift-giving

Tied by many to the gifts of the wise men (Matthew 2:11), to Nicholas of Myra, and to the Roman custom of New Year gifts.

Santa Claus

Nicholas of Myra by way of the Dutch Sinterklaas, given his sleigh in 1823 and his red suit by advertising (H11).

Holiday spending

The National Retail Federation forecast United States holiday sales for November and December 2025 at more than $1 trillion, the first forecast above that mark.

A public holiday

A legal holiday in most nations. Massachusetts made it one only in 1856 (H12).

The church’s appointed remembrance is weekly, and it looks to the cross

The New Testament gives the church one day and one memorial: the first day, and the Supper that proclaims His death (S1, S2).

The church gathered “upon the first day of the week” to break bread (S1). The Lord Himself gave the memorial: “this do in remembrance of me”, and Paul says what it proclaims, “the Lord’s death till he come” (S2). That is the remembrance God appointed, on the day the apostles kept it. Apostolic example binds, and a specific appointment excludes other kinds: the church has no warrant to add a second, yearly memorial to its worship.

The New Testament shows no church keeping the birth, and the record bears that out: the first sure sign of the feast is at Rome about three hundred years after the church began (H4), and the East kept another day (H5). A feast that began that late is not part of the worship the apostles delivered.

Scripture tells the birth in full and gives it no day

The birth is good news to be preached with joy, but the text gives it no date, no command and no yearly feast (S3).

Matthew and Luke tell the birth in detail, and the angel calls it “good tidings of great joy” (S3). The church rightly preaches it: the Word became flesh, and without the birth there is no cross. Any Lord’s Day may hear it.

But the text names no day. Luke says the shepherds were in the field by night, which some take as against midwinter, though that is debated. More to the point, no apostle commands a remembrance of the birth and no church is shown keeping one. Preaching the incarnation is given; a feast of it in the church’s worship is not.

Days are a matter of conscience for each believer, not a law for the church

Romans 14 leaves one believer free to regard a day and another free not to, and forbids each to judge the other (S4, S5).

Paul writes of believers who differed over days: “One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let each man be fully assured in his own mind” (S4). The days at Rome were most likely Jewish days and fasts, so the passage does not set out to approve a Christian feast. It does give the rule for a Christian’s own regard for a day: it is between the believer and the Lord, and no one may judge him for it (S5).

So a Christian may keep December 25 as a family and national holiday, give gifts, and thank God at home for the birth of His Son. What they may not do is make that day binding on others, or bring it into the church’s worship as a holy day (A1).

Jeremiah describes cutting a tree from the forest and decking it with silver and gold: a picture of the Christmas tree, condemned as a custom of the heathen.

Read on and the tree is an idol: carved by the workman, fastened so it will not fall, “like a palm-tree, of turned work”, that cannot speak and must be carried (S6, and verses 8-9 and 14). Jeremiah condemns making a god of wood, not decorating a home. The text does not speak to the Christmas tree, unless someone honors a tree as holy. The case against a feast in the church’s worship rests on the New Testament (A1), not on this passage.

Paul rebukes those who “observe days, and months, and seasons, and years”. Christmas is such a day.

The Galatians were taking up the law’s calendar as a way to stand right with God (verses 4:21 and 5:4), and Paul fears his labor was in vain. Read in context, the text strikes at any day made necessary to please God, which fits a feast imposed as a duty on the church. It does not by itself forbid a believer’s private regard for a day, which Romans 14 allows (S4). The research behind this page asks that Galatians 4:10 not be cited against a Christian feast without that context, and it is given here.

A feast the Lord never gave, taught as a duty, is worship by the precepts of men.

This is a right use. Jesus condemns teaching human rules as God’s doctrine, and a church that binds December 25 on its members, as a day of obligation, does just that. It weighs against the feast in the church’s worship (A1). It does not reach a family that keeps the day without calling it God’s command (A3).

Christmas customs come from pagan festivals, so Christians must come out from them and touch no unclean thing.

Paul’s charge is about yoking with unbelief and sharing in idol worship (verses 14-16). Whether the date came from a pagan festival is disputed (see How it began), and a custom of uncertain roots is not idol worship unless it is used as such. Paul elsewhere lets a believer eat meat from the market without asking where it came from (1 Corinthians 10:25). The stronger objection to the feast is not its roots but its absence from the New Testament (A1).

Heaven itself celebrated the birth with praise. The church does well to do the same each year.

Heaven’s praise is reason to praise God for the incarnation, and the church may, in its worship on any Lord’s Day. But the angels praised at the event; they did not appoint an anniversary. The text gives joy in the birth, not a day for it (A2).

The wise men rejoiced, worshiped and brought gifts: a pattern for Christmas worship and giving.

They worshiped the child where He was, when God led them to Him, and the text sets no yearly remembrance of their visit. Christ is worthy of worship and gifts, and a family may give gifts at Christmas freely (A3). The visit does not make a feast for the church.

Study

• Acts 20:7 and 1 Corinthians 11:26 give the church a weekly remembrance of Christ’s death. Why might God have appointed a memorial of the death, and not of the birth?
• Romans 14:5 says “Let each man be fully assured in his own mind.” Where does a Christian’s liberty over a day end, and the church’s worship begin?
• Jeremiah 10:3-5 and Galatians 4:10 are often quoted against Christmas. Read each in its chapter. Does the argument depend on the text, or on a conclusion reached elsewhere?
• The feast first appears about three hundred years after the church began (H4). Does it matter how early a practice began, if Scripture does not give it?

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