Red-Letter Day
December 25
also known as Christmas Day, The Nativity, Christmas
The feast of the birth of Jesus Christ at Bethlehem. Kept on December 25 at Rome by the mid-fourth century, the earliest surviving witness being a calendar entry of 354 reflecting a practice usually traced to the 330s, and carried east city by city over the following century, reaching Constantinople about 380 and Antioch by 386. Scripture gives no date for the birth itself.
The birth this day keeps is undated. Matthew and Luke give no month and no day, and every ancient date offered for it is a later writer's calculation rather than a record. What can be dated is the day: a line in a Roman calendar compiled in 354, in the list the Roman church kept of its own commemorations, reading "VIII kal. Ian. natus Christus in Betleem Iudeae." Scholars commonly trace that layer of the calendar back to 336, though the compilers of the Catholic Encyclopedia themselves cautioned that it may carry no evidence earlier than 354. Either way, this is the first hard sign of the feast: not a decree, not a sermon, but a calendar entry.
From Rome the day travelled east, and it travelled by preachers rather than by councils. No council ever settled the date. Gregory Nazianzen kept it at Constantinople about 380 in the small chapel of Anastasia; his exile the following year let it lapse there before it was permanently restored. At Antioch in December 386 John Chrysostom stood in a crowded church and defended a custom his own congregation could remember arriving: "Although it is not yet the tenth year since this day became clear and familiar to us, through your zeal, it has now flourished as though it was given from the beginning many years ago." The words are the single most precise datum we have for when a named city took up December 25. Alexandria came later still: Paul of Emesa preached the Nativity there before Cyril on 25 December 432, and the feast was firmly established in Egypt within the following year. Jerusalem held out longest of the great sees, keeping the Nativity inside the January 6 feast when the pilgrim Egeria visited about 381 to 384, still doing so when Jerome reproved Palestine for it about 411, and still described that way in the mid-sixth century. No source consulted fixes when Jerusalem finally separated the two.
Why the twenty-fifth of December at all is a question the evidence leaves open. The same codex of 354 carries, in its civil calendar, the Roman state holiday of the Unconquered Sun on the same day, a festival that reached its height of popularity under Aurelian in 274; Hermann Usener argued in 1889 that the church chose the date to annex the solar feast. Against him, Steven Hijmans argued in 2003 that no firm evidence places a December 25 solar festival before the earliest Christian evidence for the date. The rival account, associated with Duchesne, runs the arithmetic instead: an old tradition placed the Passion on March 25, an ancient conviction held that a great life runs whole years from conception to death, and nine months from March 25 falls on December 25. Neither position has been settled, and neither can say anything about the birth, which remains undated.
What the earliest preaching for the day shows is that the feast arrived as an argument. Gregory's Constantinople sermon is largely a catalogue of what not to do: not to adorn porches, not to arrange dances, not to make "high beds of leaves, making tabernacles for the belly" while others "are hungry and in want, who are made of the same clay and in the same manner." Leo the Great, preaching at Rome between 440 and 461, reported that some Christians, before entering St Peter's, turned on the steps and bowed to the rising sun. The same Leo gave the day the sentence it has never lost: "Christian, acknowledge your dignity, and becoming a partner in the Divine nature, refuse to return to the old baseness by degenerate conduct." That is the shape of the feast in its first centuries, a claim about what has happened to human nature, pressed on people who were not yet sure how to keep it.
The claim has been kept at cost. In 1644 the Long Parliament ordered the day observed as a fast, on the ground that men had "turned this Feast, pretending the memory of Christ into an extreame forgetfulnesse of him"; in 1647 it abolished the festival outright. John Evelyn wrote in his diary for Christmas Day 1652, "no sermon anywhere, no church being permitted to be open, so observed it at home," and in 1657, arrested at the altar in Exeter Chapel, that "the miscreants held their muskets against us, as if they would have shot us at the altar; but yet suffering us to finish the office of Communion." In 1659 the Massachusetts Bay General Court fined five shillings for "observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labour, feasting, or any other way." The colony repealed that law in 1681, under royal pressure on its legal code rather than from any change of heart.
And the day has kept doing what its oldest sermons asked of it. Francis of Assisi, at Greccio at Christmas 1223, asked his host that he might "make memorial of that Child who was born in Bethlehem, and in some sort behold with bodily eyes His infant hardships"; the manger was made ready, the ox and the ass led in, and "of Greccio there was made as it were a new Bethlehem." Thomas Tusser, writing farming advice in verse in Elizabethan England, put the plainest case for the winter feast: "At Christmas by labour is little to get, / that wanting, the poorest in danger are set. / What season then better, of all the whole yeere, / thy needie poore neighbour to comfort and cheere?" Lancelot Andrewes, preaching before King James at Whitehall in 1618, took his hearers from the crib to the altar: "in the beasts' crib the food of Angels." Bernard of Clairvaux, twelve centuries into the feast's life, had already met the objection that the reader may be feeling: "Let no one be so indevout, so ungrateful, so irreligious, as to say: This is nothing new; it was heard long ago; Christ was born long ago." The answer the day gives is that the newness was never in the announcement. Leo's word for it stands: there is no proper place for sadness, when we keep the birthday of the Life.
You have almost certainly heard everything this day has to say before, and Bernard's objectors had heard it too. Notice what the earliest preaching for the feast actually asks of you: not more feeling, but a change of use. Gregory names the hungry standing outside the festivity, made of the same clay; Tusser puts the case in the plainest register available, that this is the season when the poorest are in most danger and therefore the season for the neighbour; Leo tells you to acknowledge your dignity and stop living beneath it. None of that requires the day to feel new. It requires only that you keep it as a day with obligations attached rather than a day with a mood attached. What, this year, would it cost you to keep it that way?
The feast's history and the birth's history are two different things, and almost every difficulty here comes from merging them. Scripture supplies no date. The earliest computations of one are third-century: Clement of Alexandria, about 200, reports rival Egyptian calculations of 20 May and 19 or 20 April, evidence that no fixed date existed even as a speculative question. Hippolytus of Rome is credited with placing the birth on December 25 about 202 to 204, but the text is disputed at exactly that point; the Catholic Encyclopedia says of the passage that interpolation is certain and admitted by Funk and Bonwetsch, so it cannot be used as clean early evidence. The work long ascribed to Cyprian, De paschae computus of 243, is sometimes recruited here and should not be: it assigns the birth to 28 March, on the ground that the material sun was created that day. It shows third-century computists reasoning from creation-dates, not arriving at December 25.
For the observance itself the documentary base is thin but firm. The Chronograph of 354, compiled at Rome by Furius Dionysius Filocalus, carries two December 25 entries in two different sections: the church's own Depositio Martyrum records the birth at Bethlehem, and the civil calendar records games for the Unconquered Sun. That coincidence in one codex is the entire documentary basis of the appropriation debate; it establishes a shared date and nothing more. Ambrose reports Pope Liberius preaching a Nativity sermon between 352 and 366, which implies an already customary December feast at Rome, though Liberius's own text does not survive. Eastward, the Catholic Encyclopedia states the near-consensus that the date reached the East from Rome "during the great anti-Arian revival, and by means of the orthodox champions": bishop to bishop, with no conciliar decree anywhere in the chain. Read the sequence as who first attests rather than who legislated. Later councils shape the day's keeping rather than its date: Braga in 563 forbids fasting on Christmas Day, and the Second Council of Tours in 566 or 567 proclaims the sanctity of the twelve days to Epiphany while laying on the Advent fast.
One story must be struck. It is often said that Pope Julius I investigated Roman archives and decreed December 25 in answer to a letter from Cyril of Jerusalem. The letter is catalogued as spurious among Cyril's works and survives only through a ninth-century intermediary, John of Nikiu; a related document is chronologically impossible outright, making Julius correspond with Juvenal of Jerusalem (c. 425 to 458) though Julius died in 352. Julius's authentic letters concern the Arian controversy alone.
The prayers have their own line of descent, and it is better attested than the date. The Veronense, copied in the early seventh century from earlier Roman booklets, still carries the Nativity under a single undivided heading shared with seven martyrs: the feast is not yet a self-standing formulary. The Gelasian sacramentary, compiled about 750 from earlier Roman material, is the first witness to give it a full shape, with prayers for the vigil at None, for the night, for the first light of morning, and for the day. The Gregorian book makes the day stational, with three Masses at St Mary Major, St Anastasia and St Peter's, each with its own texts. Sarum preserved that Roman three-Mass structure in England centuries after the Roman geography that produced it had ceased to matter, keeping even the memorial of St Anastasia at the dawn Mass.
The Christmas Octave runs to January 1, and the days inside it belong to the season rather than to the Day: Stephen on the 26th, John on the 27th, the Holy Innocents on the 28th, and on the octave day the Circumcision and Holy Name. The twelve days run on to Epiphany on January 6, which is where the feast's own history is most visible, since in the fourth-century East the Nativity and the manifestations were one January 6 feast. Gregory Nazianzen's sermon is titled for both, and says outright that two titles are given to the one thing. The Armenian Apostolic Church never adopted the December date and still keeps Nativity and Theophany together on January 6, with the Lighting of the Lamps liturgy on the eve and an octave to January 13. Its example is the standing qualification on any claim that this is a universally kept feast.
Much of what the modern world does on the day is later than people assume. The crib descends by continuous documented tradition from Greccio in 1223, and is the most widespread piece of Christmas material culture there is. The Christmas tree is first definitely mentioned at Strasburg in 1605; it was brought to England by Queen Charlotte, who dressed a bough at Windsor in December 1800, and its popularity there is dated precisely to the engraving of the royal family around a tree in 1848; the Luther and Boniface origin stories are legend. The Yule log became a public ceremony in England in 1577. Midwinter greenery is older than its attachment to the feast and was being resisted rather than sanctioned: Martin of Braga, about 575, condemned the calends practice of greenery decorations. The service that shapes many people's picture of the day is younger still. Edward White Benson arranged nine carols and nine lessons "from ancient sources" for Christmas Eve at Truro in 1880; Eric Milner-White, newly Dean of King's after service as an army chaplain, adapted it at Cambridge on Christmas Eve 1918, six weeks after the Armistice, and it was first broadcast in 1928.
*Chronography of 354, Depositio Martyrum***: the earliest hard witness to the feast, carrying "VIII kal. Ian. natus Christus in Betleem Iudeae." Text at tertullian.org, Part 12; the civil calendar's entry for the Unconquered Sun is a separate page, Part 6.
*John Chrysostom, In diem natalem Domini nostri Jesu Christi, sections 1 and 2*, trans. the Revd Andrew Maguire, at earlychurchtexts.com (the freely available `/public/` page): the "not yet the tenth year" sentence.
*Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 38, "On the Theophany, or Birthday of Christ," sections III and V*, trans. Browne and Swallow, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. vii, at New Advent: the fused title, and the catalogue of festal excesses.
*Leo the Great, Sermons 21 and 27*, trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. xii, at New Advent: "acknowledge your dignity" and "no proper place for sadness" at Sermon 21, sections I and III; the worshippers bowing to the sun on the steps of St Peter's at Sermon 27, section IV. The two sermons are commonly conflated; they are separate.
*Thomas of Celano, First Life of S. Francis, ch. XXX, sections 84 to 87*, trans. A. G. Ferrers Howell (London, 1908), pp. 82 to 85: the Greccio narrative.
Bernard of Clairvaux, third Christmas Vigil sermon, "On the Dispositions Required in Those Who Celebrate the Feast", in Sermons of St. Bernard on Advent and Christmas (London, 1909), p. 91: the staleness objection answered. The edition's own preface admits omissions; a Latin check is owed before any further quotation.
*Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, ch. 27*, ed. Payne and Herrtage (English Dialect Society, 1878), pp. 66 to 71.
*Lancelot Andrewes, Ninety-six Sermons, vol. I* (1841 reprint of the 1629 edition), Sermon XII, preached 25 December 1618, pp. 213 to 214: "in the beasts' crib the food of Angels."
*C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660, vol. I*, pp. 580 and 954: the 1644 fast ordinance's preamble and the 1647 abolition.
*John Evelyn, Diary*** (Project Gutenberg 41218), entries for 25 December 1652 and 25 December 1657.
Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, vol. IV part 1 (Boston, 1854), p. 366, with the repeal at vol. V, pp. 122 and 339.
Sacramentarium Leonianum (Veronense), ed. C. L. Feltoe (Cambridge, 1896), pp. 159 to 160; Liber Sacramentorum Romanae Ecclesiae (Gelasian), ed. H. A. Wilson (Oxford, 1894), pp. 1 to 6; Gregorian Sacramentary (Hadrianum), ed. Wilson, Henry Bradshaw Society 49 (1915); *The Sarum Missal in English*, trans. A. H. Pearson (1868), pp. 16 to 24: the four sacramental witnesses behind the propers section.
The Book of Common Prayer (2019), Christmas Eve and Christmas Day II and III propers, and the Proper Prefaces; with the 1549 and 1662 propers at justus.anglican.org.
Catholic Encyclopedia (1908), "Christmas," by Cyril Charles Martindale, at New Advent: the eastward-spread dates, the Braga and Tours canons, the Hippolytus interpolation caution, the 1605 Strasburg tree, the 1577 Yule log, and the Martin of Braga greenery notice. A 1908 tertiary synthesis: it reports Usener and Duchesne rather than transmitting them directly.
*Steven Hijmans, "Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas," Mouseion 47.3 (2003), 377 to 398; Hermann Usener, Das Weihnachtsfest (1889, revised 1911)*: the two poles of the date debate. Both are reported here at abstract and secondary level; neither was read in full.
*A. C. Benson, The Life of Edward White Benson, vol. I* (London, 1899), pp. 483 to 484, with the King's College Cambridge history pages for the 1918 adaptation and the 1928 broadcast.
Then the English books. In 1549 the three Masses become two, with the Sarum midnight and third-Mass readings kept and a wholly new collect written for the second: "Almyghtye God, whiche haste geuen us thy onlye begotten sonne to take our nature upon hym." Sarum's dawn Mass was dropped outright rather than merged. In 1552 the first Communion disappeared, and the second's collect and readings became simply the Christmas Day propers, carried without substantial alteration through 1662, 1789, 1892 and 1928. The collect is one of Cranmer's own English compositions rather than a translation of any identified Latin original; that is the settled scholarly consensus and the verdict recorded in this project's own collect-provenance research. The twentieth-century liturgical movement restored the threefold shape, and the 2019 Book of Common Prayer continues it. The readings restored match Sarum's sequence almost exactly, eight centuries on: Titus 2 with Luke 2:1-14, Titus 3 with Luke 2:15-20, Hebrews 1 with John 1. The collects were not restored in the same way; Christmas Day II and III carry the identical Cranmer collect, so there are two collects across three sets of propers. Why the compilers did that is documented nowhere and is recorded here only as an observation.
Almighty God, you have given your only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and to be born [this day] of a pure virgin: Grant that we, who have been born again and made your children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by your Holy Spirit; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with you and the same Spirit be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.