[Northkeep] Halloween

[Jennifer Carlson]

Karl wrote:
 

> The early church was very big on taking over existing holidays.
> 
> They stole holidays right and left to make it easier to convert the pagans. Its much easier to make a new convert follow your religion if you give him the same days but alter the meaning instead of giving him new dates and making him forget the old ones. Halloween, Easter and Christmas are the three biggest examples of this. Yule was replaced by Christmas, even though scholars are fairly sure that Jesus of Nazareth was probably born in the late winter/early spring and All Saints Day was created to replace Samhain and most of the other pagan harvest festivals. Easter replaced Passover and other spring holidays about that same time frame of the year dating all the way back to Babylon.

 

It’s more like the early church scrabbled to fit in.  Christianity started off as a tiny offshoot of Judaism, and, frequently, an outlawed one at that.  It took centuries for the church to become the huge institution we think of.
              Yes, it might be easier to gain a convert if you can offer a product that looks similar to what he’s got.  There is a tradition that one Pope told his missionaries and bishops to do just that (Jerome, I think, don’t quote me), but there is no hard evidence of it actually being done.  People, however, didn’t convert because the priests said “come to Christianity, we have cookies”: they converted because either they were attracted to the message, or because their rulers were attracted to it and insisted all their peoples convert with them.  If traditional festivals were overlaid with a Christian holiday, it was more “repurposing” than “stealing.”  
                Christmas did not set out to target Yule.  If it was out to compete with anything, it focused upon what was the biggest holiday season of the early Christian world: the Roman Saturnalia, which ran from roughly December 17 to 23, and the birth of Mithras (a popular early-Imperial Roman cult) on December 25.  The Christian faith spread through Italy before it started thinking about taking on Gauls, Germans, and those far-flung Britannic types, and that means it worked first with what the Romans were used to doing.  Christmas was fixed on December 25 around A.D. 386 by John Chrysostom in Antioch – a far cry from Scandinavia and before Christian missionaries had made it even to Ireland, let alone Scandinavia.  Scandinavia wouldn’t be introduced to Christianity until the 900s, more than four hundred years later.
                Medieval Christmas, by the way, was a low-key religious event, not the big gift-giving and plum-pudding affair it became in the later Middle Ages, and certainly nothing like the religio-commercial orgy it is today.  Advent was a penitential period, just like Lent, in which you were expected to fast and make extra prayers.  Christmas itself was celebrated with special masses, and perhaps local festivals involving special foods and a day off from feudal obligations.  
It was Ephiphany, or Twelfth Night, that was the big blowout: the revelation of Christ to the world, marked by the arrival of the Wise Men in Bethlehem with their gifts, was the big party, a good half a month beyond the Winter Solstice and any celebrations, old or new, associated with it.  
                By the high middle ages you see Christmas becoming a big social event, catching up with Ephiphany.   It took some lumps during the Reformation, but eventually settled in even with the Calvinists, and has been on a growth pattern ever since.
 
                Passover has not been “stolen.”  Easter did not replace Passover.  Passover was, is, and always will be a Jewish holiday.  Easter is concurrent with Passover.  Easter is for Christians, Passover is for Jews.  The earliest Christians were Jews, and still celebrated Passover along with whatever developing observations of Christ’s resurrection they had.  But after St. Paul threw open Christianity to non-Jews, the game changed, and the seder and other Passover observations were things the bulk of Christians had never had contact with.  The only modern Easter tradition that overlaps Passover is eating lamb (my family ate ham instead, a decidedly non-Passover entrée), but in pastoral cultures, you are going to eat lamb in the spring because spring is generally lambing season and shepherds have to consider how much new stock to keep.
 
                And as for All Saints Day, it was originally celebrated in the springtime, overlapping the Roman Lemures festival.  It was moved to November 1 by Gregory III (aka “The Great, who got his name attached to the chant and calendar) sometime between A.D. 731 and 741.  There is indeed record that the Irish kept to the spring celebration of All Saints for some time, but the Irish church quarreled with the Roman one about the liturgical calendar for centuries before the Irish finally accepted the Roman practices at the Synod of Whitby in A.D. 664.  Christianity had been in Ireland for three centuries (the first missionaries getting there in the early 5th century) before Gregory moved All Saints to November 1.  
 
Let’s face it, when two religions both have a commemoration of a particular point in the year, and one religion eventually becomes more popular than the other, it’s going to look like the popular one usurped the others. 
 
Pedantically,
 
 
Talana