Accomodating Pagan Populace

How, we should ask, did these pagan customs become a widely accepted part of the Christianity? William Walsh describes how and why unchristian religious rites and practices were assimilated into the Christmas celebration:

“This was no mere accident. It was a necessary measure at a time when the new religion [Christianity] was forcing itself upon a deeply superstitious people. In order to reconcile fresh converts to the new faith, and to make the breaking of old ties as painless as possible, thes relics of paganism were retained under modified forms.. .

“Thus we find that when Pope Gregory [5540-604] sent Saint Augustine as a missionary to convert Anglo-Saxon England he directed that so far as possible the saint should accommodate the new and strange Christian rites to the heathen ones with which the natives had been familiar from their birth.

“For example, he advised Saint Augustine to allow his converts on certain festivals to eat and kill great number of oxen to the glory of God the Father, as for merely they had done this in honor of [their gods]. . . On the very Christmas after his arrival in England, Saint Augustine baptized many thousands of converts and permitted their usual December celebration under the new name and with the new beginning” (Walsh, p. 61).

Gregory permitted such importation of pagan religious practices on the grounds that when dealing with “obdurate minds it is impossible to cut off everything at once” (William Sansom, A Book of Christmas, p. 30).

Tragically, Christianity never accomplished the task of cutting off everything pagan. According to Owen Chadwick, former professor of history at Cambridge University, the Romans “kept the winter solstice with a feast of drunkenness and riot. The Christians thought that they could bring a better meaning into that feast. They tried to persuade their flocks not to drink or eat too much, and to keep the feast more austerely – but without success. . .” (A History of Christianity, 1995, p. 24).

(taken from Holidays or Holy Days Does it Matter,p.6, 2006 reprint)