Which pagan festival was replaced by christmas?
Those early rulers of the Church were astute enough to know, or perhaps had learned the hard way, that rather than fight beloved pagan customs, it was better to accept them and subthy transform them , especially festivals….. It would seem fitting that the birthday of the sun should become the birthday of the “Sun of Resurrection” and one guesses that this was the pagan-Christian blending in the Fathers’ minds when they accepted the twenty-fifth of December as the Christmas date; but there was another pair of Roman feasts, far more popular than Natalis Invicti; the Saturnalia, which lasted from the seventeenth to the twenty-third of December, and the Kalends of January, the first three days of the new year. The Saturnalia had begun as a feast which broke for a few days through all barriers of class and behavior- a momory of a golden time when just and kindly Saturn ruled as king, and all men were their master, and women, if they were masked, could flirt with whom they chose. The Kalen
