Peter Geoghegan: Wise up and make Christmas a moveable feast

Christ wasn’t born on 25 December. So why not go lunar in a bid to escape the festive ennui?

IT IS a day that marks some important anniversaries. Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as leader of the then Soviet Union on 25 December. A gaggle of squiffy Scottish students “borrowed” the Stone of Scone, while its custodians were tucking into their turkey, on 25 December. The Vietnamese Nationalist Party was formed on the official feast of Christ’s birth (props to Wikipedia for that one), aka Christmas Day.

Sadly none of these major events in world history ever happened near my house. Here, 25 December has followed such a tired and tested pattern that Christmas days of the future already appear fully formed and sepia tinged. There’s a pallid, balder me still sleeping late, still eating too many Quality Street (yes, they still exist), still watching endless repeats of It’s A Wonderful Life (still the day’s saving grace), before retiring to bed unhealthy, impoverished and docile.

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Labelling me a Grinch is fair enough but I doubt I’m alone. All those long faces trooping along our garishly decorated high streets and shopping malls, do they look like they’re enjoying themselves? The sound of Christmas jingles ringing since early November, with nothing but the thudding monotony of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day to look forward to. And exactly 12 months later, they’ll do it all again.

Therein lies Christmas’s fundamental flaw – it’s so crushingly predictable it makes the Scottish Premier League look mercurial.

If variety is really the spice of life then Christmas is the blandest of the bland festivals, rolling into town at exactly the same time every year, greeted by the same rituals and traditions, and with precious little to separate one yuletide from the next.

The solution? Follow Easter’s lead, peg Christmas to the lunar calendar and return 25 December to its rightful place as a regular day.

It’s not as loony an idea as it sounds.

There is no compelling reason for believing that Jesus Christ was born on 25 December and not, say, 8 February. The gospels contain precious little hints about the time of year of his birth, and what details are dotted about aren’t always helpful. If the Three Wise Men were really following Haley’s Comet, as some theologians believe, then King Herod was already dead – a rather inconvenient truth for the traditional Christmas narrative.

Indeed, it is commonly accepted that the first reference to the actual date of Christ’s birth appears not in the Bible but in the writings of early Christian scribe Sextus Julius Africanus, sometime around 225AD. In nigh on two millennia since, all manner of weird and wonderful arguments have been posited in support of 25 December as the date of his birth: in 1889, French clergyman Louis Duchesne contended that it had to be Christ’s birthday, as he was conceived, so to speak, nine months after the Annunciation. Unfortunately, Duchesne’s inference didn’t stand close scrutiny; as scholars soon realised establishing a historically verifiable date for Christ’s conception is even more difficult than finding one for his birth.

The winter solstice offers the most plausible explanation for the original choice of date. As Isaac Newton noted in the 18th century, the festival which the Romans called bruma was celebrated on 25 December in the Julian calendar (or 21 December or 22 December on the Gregorian calendar in use today). This solstice theory also fits neatly into the cosmic symbolism of the early church, which placed the birth of John the Baptist on the summer solstice.

So if Christmas Day is not really Christ’s birthday – as all but the most literal Christians now believe – what is to stop us changing the date?

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Better yet, given that we still celebrate the birth of Jesus – who was a Jew after all – using the Jewish lunar calendar, why not use the same method to commemorate his birth?

Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after Passover, the 14th day of Nisan, the first month on the Jewish calendar. Using a similar formula to calculate Christmas Day would be tricky but not impossible. With the aid of lunar charts, we could find out where the Moon was on 25 December in year zero, establish what date this was on the Jewish calendar and extrapolate from there. This Jewish date would then act as our new Christmas Day, migrating around December and early January much like Easter varies between 22 March and 25 April.

You don’t have to be a grumpy person like me to see the benefits of a new, flexible Christmas. Just like Easter no-one will know when the new Christmas is until a few weeks beforehand. By which stage, it’ll be too late to book the dreaded office parties or worry yourself silly about buying presents that nobody actually wants or needs.

Even if our consumer society manages to trick us all back into the shopping precincts months before Christmas Day – it has past form in the dark art after all – the new lunar date offers other, more humanistic, blessings.

Not everyone has great memories of 25 December. Unhitching Christmas from the tyranny of 25 December won’t undo a painful childhood but it will make it easier to escape the ghosts of Christmases past, to imagine new Christmases on a different date every year.

Children would love it, too.

And the religiously minded would have something to cheer about. Adopting the Jewish calendar to celebrate the birth of Jesus certainly could hardly be dressed up as secular encroachment. If anything it might reinvigorate the Judaeo-Christian aspects of the festival so many church leaders bemoan the loss of.

The campaign to make Christmas a moveable feast starts here. Or at least it will once I’ve finished the mince pies and watched the Doctor Who special.

Peter Geoghegan is a writer and journalist based in Edinburgh.