Yuletide

I love December.  I love the decoration, the people, the wining and dining, the intense and often irrational religious debates! Fox's "war on christmas" is a personal favorite of mine.  The debate over holiday or christmas trees.  I'm amused by the idea of a large conspiracy to destroy christmas, specifically christmas.  Of course I don't take this crap seriously! It's just way fun to watch people throw fits over.  I think it's fairly well documented that a christmas tree would have been considered satanic to said founding settlers that Fox deems so righteous.  I love this kind of stuff.

Regardless most things that are a part of our modern version of christmas has very little to do with what I would think christmas is supposed to be to christians.  The intense pressure to buy buy buy, CONSUME! I'm not christian, but it seems most of the things I see about christmas in December are based mostly on capitalism and not christianity.  Personally, I'd rather have a long drawn out dinner and hours of discussion over wine with friends than swap gifts, but that is impossible when you're only in town for a couple days and three families demand your attention. 

By my understanding of Christmas, which I've basically picked up through culture alone, is Jesus was born of a supposed virgin on December 25th.  That's about all I know.  I believe that it is also fairly well documented that a Jesus was NOT born in December.  The virgin concept alone is enough to confuse me, and I find unbelievable, not in a good way.  To me it demonstrates the start of deeming sex evil, and I highly disagree, but that's an entire discussion in itself. It drives me crazy that this family is almost always depicted as Caucasian, and if this story happened where they say it did....they are most likely not Caucasian.
 So anyway, if Jesus is not born in December as many scholars say, what the hell is all this Christmas crap about?  A popular theory is that a lot of christian holidays are based around earlier Pagan holidays.  There is not sufficient proof of this for me, probably never will be, it's just a theory.  The idea is that it is easier to convert the country folk if the religious holy days fall closely to their own.

The contemporary Pagan Yule I don't think is very similar to pre christian Yule.  I don't think a pre christian pagan would recognize what paganism is today.  To me, Yule is the longest night of the year, which is interesting and has a bit different energy than other "normal" days.  That's as far as I personally go.  Some Pagan theology says that on Yule the goddess gives birth to next years god.  Born on the darkest night of the year, as he grows the light/sun becomes more prominent, you get the idea.  It's an interesting story, but I'm not one to jump on this bandwagon, but it does provide a theory as to where christmas derived from.

I also think the flip side could be true as well, and the christian holiday was changed into a Pagan holiday to suite modern Paganism (starting around 1930s) recruitment.  I certainly don't know the answer, I'm just throwing out topics I've read about for years.  Whatever the answer, it's all remarkably similar.  It comes down to does it really matter what came first? What suites the modern era more?