Perhaps now is the time to re-run an old Christmas joke: 'Now they're trying to drag religion into Christmas'. Although the connections and disconnections between religion and Christmas still seem to take some people by surprise, nobody really minds, except the Jehovah's Witnesses. For example, David Baddiel, delivering his 4thought on Channel 4, explained how much he, as a self-confessed, culturally Jewish atheist, really enjoyed Christmas celebrations. A truly healthy contrast with the po-faced Christians who are still expecting the media to mediate the 'true meaning of Christmas', and who write to the Radio Times when they do – or don't.
I don't think there's anything wrong with enjoying our birthdays as part of any religion. I can remember children's birthdays being celebrated when I was in Sunday School. They have a good pagan ancestry. Josephus, the Jewish historian, wrote that the Greeks and Romans celebrated birthdays. However, the Jews did not, precisely because birthdays were pagan and were associated with astrology and horoscopes. For the same reasons, of course, the first Christians did not celebrate birthdays, with no exception for Jesus. It is no surprise that the earliest New Testament documents, Paul's letters and the gospel called Mark, never even mention Jesus' birth, let alone a birth day. No one remembered his birth, there was no record; nobody cared, especially since all the attention was focused on his death and his many curtain calls.
By contrast there is one birthday mentioned in Mark: that of Herod Antipas when he executed John the Baptiser to reward Herodias's daughter, the dancing girl who had pleased him. That can be seen as a revealing commentary about early Christian attitudes to birthdays – and parties. On this point, then, we may concede that the Jehovah's Witnesses agree with the primitive Christians.
So the surprise is finding birth stories added at the beginning of the later gospels called Matthew and Luke. The added surprise is that although they are so divergent nobody seems to notice it when constructing Nativity Plays. Such discrepancies are hardly whispered even on the best Radio 4 documentaries in December, although New Testament scholar E.P. Sanders calls them 'the clearest cases of invention in the Gospels'.
What has become a commonplace on those Radio 4 broadcasts is that during the third to fourth centuries the Church invented a birthday for Jesus. Specifically, how the Church placed Jesus' birthday on 25th December to fit the pagan, midwinter Roman festival of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, just after Saturnalia, perhaps with the application of a little imperial pressure following the story of Constantine's semi-conversion and subsequent inflation of the modest religion. The veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary was added. After all, a pure, feminine face was needed alongside the hundreds of saints and martyrs. They also located a few other virgins to add to the growing list of grizzled men.
Most of us enjoy pagan religion's midwinter festivities in whatever way we can, yet a special Mass for Christ was constructed and we have certainly enjoyed imitating Constantine and inflating the celebration: images and similes taken from nature such as holly and ivy, roses with thorns, accompanied by the invention of popular carols. Other more solemn music making was thought appropriate for proper church worship, culminating in the full-blown oratorio. Decorations, gifts, cards, trees, lights, all contributed to the eventual full-blown popular Victorian celebration, not to mention the feasting and drinking.
Although a few of us Scrooges wring our hands in sorrow or horror at the Xmas materialism making its start early in mid-summer, preferring to wait for the precise tones of King's College Chapel Choir to stir our cockles on Christmas Eve. By then it's too late to buy anything, of course, but then Scrooges don't spend. Personally, I'm quite happy to buy my Christmas cards half price in January.
However, there is no doubt that the joke comes full circle, 'Christ's Mass was dragged into religion', rather than vice versa, but that's all right: I'm with David Baddiel on this.