WHEN CHRISTMAS WAS IN JANUARY.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2693, 24 December 1909, Page 3 (Supplement)

WHEN CHRISTMAS WAS IN JANUARY.

THE FESTIVAL HAS NOT ALWAYS BEEN CELEBRATED IN DECEMBER.

Nobody knows the real date of Christmas Day. If there ever was a written record of the actual date of the Nativity, it has perished beyond hope of recovery. The best that men have been able to do when they wished to commemorate the greatest anniversarj' in Christendom has been to trust to guesswork. During the earliest times the favorite day for Christmas was in Januray. It was held in England in that month at the time of the coming of the Anglo-Saxon .conquerors. March has also had its Christina,- Days. One of the main difficulties in accepting December 25 as the date is that December is the season of Hoods in Palestine ; when the country is in 7 such a condition that it seems impossible that during that month the Jewish shepherds should have been out in the open fields at night, watching their Hocks, as they are recorded to have been.

The reasons which led the early Christians to fix on December 25 as Christma a Day were various, but one of them, at least, appears to have been curious. For a long time after the beginning of Christianity the world was divided into two hostile camps of believers and pagans. The greatest festival ot the pagans of Rome was the Saturnalia, which occurred during the month of December.

Pleasure and topsy-turvydom reigned during the Saturnalia. Scenes of wild gaiety were to be-witnessed on every hand, and law and authority ceased to exist' for twenty-four hours. Great rulers, generals and nobles put aside their pride and dignity and mingled with tlie lowest of tbe mob on equal terms. Slaves' sat down to gorgeous feasts ,and were waited on by their masters. But mingled with all tins mirth were occurrences of wild terror and cruelty. The Christian bishops were anxious to devise some better and purer festival to counteract the evils of the Saturnalia. There is reason to believe that they sought to effect this object by settling that December 25 should be Christmas Day. But it was not till well on in tbe sixth century that tlie date was at all generally accepted. Millions of Christians, have never accepted it. The Christians of Armenia have steadfastly declined to have anything to do with December 25, and have for many centuries kept Christmas Day at Epiphany, on January G. In the Czar’s vast empire some people observe December 25 and others keep to January 6, but both these Christmases fall on different days from ours. This is explained by tbe proceedings of Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory XIII. "When the great Roman conqueror became the master of the world he found the calendar in a frightful state of confusion. Caesar devised a reformed calendar of his own; but, though it worked well for a long time, it was_not perfect. It gained a fraction of time each year. This did not amount to much in itself, but as the centuries rolled on it mounted up, and after nearly sixteen hundred • vears the world was ten days in advance of actual dates. That is, what was called January 1 was really January 10.

People were celebrating Christmas Day on January 4, while all the time they blissfully imagined it was December 25. In 1552 Pope Gregory reformed the calendar by the extremely simple expedient of ordering that October 5 of that year should be called October 15- . , . The intermediate ten nays were simplv knocked off. “Most countries in Europe promptly adopted this change: but some of them at first declined to do so, and England wa , amongst these. All through the seventeenth century, therefore, England was ten days behind the greater part of the rest of the world as regards date. In the eighteenth century, on account of the Julian calendar having by then gained another day, Englishmen were eleven days behind. Finally, the confusion arising from the use of two calendars became such a nuisance a= to seriously interfere with trade. So in 1752, after a vast amount of debate—for many good folk thought it was irreligious to tamper with such things—an Act of Parliament ordained that September 2 of that year should he reckoned as Sepenibe r 14.The Russians, however, irom start to finish, have absolutely refused to have anything to do'with the Gregoriau calendar, and their Christmas takes place on what is bur January <.