This is a very long post, with links to a TON of resources. The focus is on providing information on the origin of modern Christmas customs as well as information on the Pagan Holidays which are sometimes pointed to as sources for Christmas. I provide some arguments about the subject, but this is mostly a collection of links to various people explaining history and providing evidence. There are summaries of the links and then some thoughts in conclusion after all the links are shared. So, here is a table of contents if you don’t want to read the whole thing. If you just want to scroll through and skim, the summaries of the resources will be bolded to set them apart from my more general commentary.
Winter Holiday Shenanigans - An Appeal to Logic (introduction and my thoughts)
Resources and Links
General
Yule/Jol
Santa Claus
Christmas Trees
Saturnalia
My concluding thoughts (Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't have an obvious book mark/table of contents option...)
Winter Holiday Shenanigans
Hanging out in NeoPagan forums might make you think that the biggest part of celebrating the Wheel of the Year is pointing out how Christians stole all their holidays and holiday customs from Pagans. People get fairly upset if you point out that, at the least, it’s not as simple as that. The response is even worse if you try to explain that a lot of the memes and popular historical thinking about holidays are relatively baseless, and in many cases, actually backwards.
Now, if you’re reading this, please don’t give up or decide that I must be misinformed or pushing a Christian agenda, before you actually explore the material. A lot of folks insist that anyone who denies the assertions that our modern holiday practices are all ancient Pagan practices must just be a Christian trying to be disruptive. In this case, you’re reading a blog that presents lots of magic, and witchcraft, so clearly, that’s not the case. I’m a Pagan, I’m an occultist, but my academic background is history and I find history to be really important. My Paganism is part of why I went to school for history.
It’s completely fine for people to celebrate holidays today in the way that is meaningful for them, even if those practices are new. Picking fights based on false assertions, or being smug and superior based on false assertions doesn’t help us as a community. Spreading untrue ideas through memes and posts just makes it harder for people to learn things that are true. It’s both dishonest and unfair. It also might make it harder for people to learn more about things which could provide deeper meaning for them.
I don’t think most people are spreading untrue things on purpose. If you’re reading this and you think Christmas Trees are an ancient Pagan celebratory practice, I’m sure you’re well meaning and thinking that what you’re doing is right and informative when you share memes or words of encouragement that spread that understanding. Hopefully, you’ll review the materials provided in this post with the same open mind and assumption of best intentions that I’m trying to approach you with.
I know just me laying out the facts won’t change people’s minds. After all, I’m just one person. Even if I provided sources and quotations, it still might be a big ask to expect you to trust me just because I’m telling you that things you’ve read in a bunch of books are incorrect. So, for the most part, this post will be providing you with videos and articles that will help you learn the actual history around Jol, Saturnalia, the Solstice, Christmas and more.
I’ll address a few points to keep in mind before providing resources though.
First, evidence and source selection. If you’re getting history from NeoPagan books and magic books, you have to remember that the authors of those books aren’t - usually - historians. The publishing companies producing them aren’t academic presses and they don’t review the books to make sure they provide factual information. Their main goal is books which sell well. The authors of these books may be repeating things they’ve learned and believed to be true but unless they explore sources to verify it then they’re just sharing hearsay. They’re not doing something bad intentionally, but their books aren’t really qualified to be sources about history.
So, what kinds of evidence should we look for? How can we know what happened? In general, there are lots of types of evidence that can inform us about historical religious practices. Laws and legal records, myths, writings by ancient and medieval historians, first hand accounts, linguistic evidence, material archeological evidence, landscape and natural resource archeology, and surviving calendars are a handful of the sorts of things that provide the type of evidence we need to learn about historical practices.
For the most part, no evidence survives showing ancient peoples or even medieval Pagans, did the things that NeoPagans are saying Christians stole, or in some cases, nothing shows they did them at the times of year, or in the ways in which modern people say they did. For many cultures and time periods, it will be unusual for us to have resources that give us the actual reasoning or descriptions of the beliefs behind the practices we are able to find evidence for.
I’m not going to refute each claim, because I’m providing you with resources to learn about them so you don’t have to take my word for it, but, as you review those resources and question their veracity (always question sources and material!) keep in mind whether or not you can find a contrary source which supports your views or claims if they differ from what historians have to say about existing evidence. If there are none, and the existing sources point in a different direction, that’s a fair sign that some of the popular claims are incorrect.
Two more things to consider, evolution, and time.
People frequently describe Christians as stealing holiday customs to trick Pagans into converting. If that was enough to trick people, those people are kind of stupid. I don’t think our ancestors are stupid and I think assuming they were tricked that way insults them. Looking at the colonial period (as well as material we have evidence about in medieval Europe) what happens is often a more natural process of merging and absorption. When people convert to a new religion, their existing culture doesn’t disappear. Their existing culture still belongs to them. They might keep elements of it. They will understand the new religion and new cultural elements through the lens of their existing culture and perspective. Both things change as they come together and interact. In some cases, Christian missionaries tried to wipe out existing cultures, and in some they actively decided to allow locals to use their existing symbols and practices and blend the two into a new expression of both. In Europe this would have been even more organic. There wasn’t as much of an outside conquering group deciding to allow people to keep their culture in early Christianity. Early Christianity spread as an underground movement. Bishops might not have liked people keeping their cultural practices but people did it anyway.
That’s a really different process than theft, or a conspiracy of elders deciding to sneakily pretend the new religion and the old look the same. The ways things come together vary from place to place and period to period, but in a lot of cases we need to recognize that cultural continuation into the Christian period is a form of survival rather than a form of conspiratorial theft.
The other thing to consider is time, and with that, place. People claim that Saturnalia celebrations led to Christians in Northern Europe adopting Saturnalia customs as Christmas customs. While there were Roman influences in those places, the Romans didn’t tend to spread their religion, so people would have kept their local customs. Roman institutional influence wasn’t continuing into the medieval period so Roman customs that had not already integrated with Christianity weren’t likely spreading North. For Saturnalia to be the source of these Christmas customs they would have needed to start in Italy.
As far as time goes. Most modern Christmas customs developed in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century. European Pagan religions never existed in a widespread fashion in the United States. A lot of early North American settlers came here because they wanted a Christianity that was more stripped down than the Christianity in Europe. So, these weren’t people who would have brought a lot of Pagan customs in most cases.
Even ignoring their puritanical influences, time is an issue. Christianity began significantly spreading through Europe prior to the fall of the Roman empire. So, before the late 5th century. Charlemagne had largely locked down much of Western Europe as Christian by the 10th century. Christmas trees are about 500 years later, and Santa Claus didn’t start wearing red and white and keeping flying reindeer until about 500 years after Christmas trees.
A lot of time elapses between their being living memory of widespread active Pagan religions and any of these Christmas customs developing. No one needed to be converted when these customs developed so Christians wouldn’t need to revive forgotten Pagan customs to convert people.
Think back to the slang we used, how we thought it was acceptable to treat people, and common perspectives on the LGBTQIA+ community 1999 versus how things are now in 2024. The changes are huge. We remember what it was like then, but if you show a 15 year old a movie from back then they’ll find it culturally problematic because the culture is different now. Think about how we decorated our houses, foods served at parties, rules about women and credit, job expectations relative to gender, and even what nuclear families looked like and how our population was dispersed in the 1950s versus now. If you weren’t alive then (I wasn’t) it’s kind of hard to imagine. Think about clothing and music in the 1920s. Think about owning slaves and using horse drawn carriages, or simply walking places, in the 1850s.
Going back 25 years gives us cultural shifts that are intense, going back 175 years creates situations none of us could imagine. We wouldn’t be able to blend in easily or understand what was going on if we got dropped off then. So why is it believable that a relatively suppressed culture was still influencing things a thousand years later? Our Christmas celebrations now are different than they were 100 years ago. Why would Christmas in 1500 look like Jol in 500? It’s not a reasonable thing to assume when you really think about it.
We can disagree on that. Maybe you think there are other factors which make it reasonable for that influence to have survived. That disagreement is fine. We can have different ways we think about how information can travel and survive. But, before we say people did a thing, or that thing was communicated to other people, we need evidence. The evidence just isn’t there.
Again, you don’t have to believe me. But, here are a bunch of people who will tell you about what is there. Even if you think I’m absolutely full of crap, these resources will still be informative and useful if you care about deepening your knowledge.
General
This first article is from the blog Living Liminally, by popular Pagan author Morgan Daimler. While folks in forums often like to claim that denouncing the memes and claims about Christmas’s Pagan origins is only being done by Christians disrupting NeoPagan forums, here is a prominent Pagan author and witch explaining some of the history and citing sources for it. They cover multiple elements, Christmas trees, mistletoe, the date for Christmas and more. The focus is more on what the actual history of these elements is and when and where they started rather than providing info on actual Pagan traditions, which is the focus of several of the other resources.
Christmas Traditions Paganism and some History
https://lairbhan.blogspot.com/2023/12/christmas-traditions-paganism-and-some.html?m=1
Yule
This first short video is from Welsh Viking. I love his stuff. Listening to him is just soothing. He’s a former PhD student in history who focuses on the Viking Period of Norse and Germanic cultures. He has a popular history program on YouTube and is really good at laying out evidence and sources in simple comprehensible ways. He’ll provide you with information on what we actually know about Yule or Jol.
Welsh Viking - How Did Vikings Celebrate Yule
https://youtu.be/LGPKm-J0cek?si=HrPof2hdvAGDuehR
This next video is by Dr. Jackson Crawford. He has translated some Old Norse texts and is a history professor specializing in the Viking period. I have enjoyed the videos I’ve seen by him. There are some who don’t like him but it seems to be more about his attitude and way of presenting things than a criticism of the material he presents. Again, he gives some information on what the historical sources tell us about Jol.
Jol (Yule): The Norse Winter Holiday
https://youtu.be/UUloIBXFOQE?si=XlvwpLnTR82Br2hz
This video is from a Norse Pagan YouTube channel. They actually provide links to the sources so you can check the sources. I don’t know what their credentials are, but they list the sources in a very clear way. They don’t always dive into quoting, but summarize clearly. This is one where I don’t fully agree with the conclusions they present. There is some room for interpretation and disagreement, and I think people who WANT Christmas to be derived from Yule will like this one. It’s a great example of how there is room to interpret on some elements but that those interpretations still need to be rooted in evidence.
The History and Celebration of Jul/Yule: What the Old Norse Sources Say!
https://youtu.be/woT-_112p7o?si=kTrhKoH8uBSVeCsB
This blog post by Dr. Peter Gainsford goes through several Yule sources and provides quotes. He gives a very thorough presentation, and he summarizes some of the myths about the origins of Christmas aside from those associated with Yule. He presents a very useful conclusion - whatever your holiday celebration is, it doesn’t need to be ancient, and ancient Christians and ancient Pagans would not recognize either modern Christmas or modern Yule. He also explains some of the origin of Christmas and points to the fact that it was a Mediterranean holiday that was established early enough for Yule to not have been an influence. I disagree with some of how he states those points as it comes across like he’s suggesting Yule didn’t exist prior to being recorded in texts after the advent of Christianity, which I don’t believe is sufficient evidence that the holiday didn’t exist prior to contact with Christianity. He also notes that there is lots of evidence of spirits menacing people at Yule, but points out how Christmas does not include that element. In the 21st, and most of the 20th century it does not, but the idea of terrifying spirits being more active at Christmas was still common in the 19th century and does seem to be a surviving Pagan element from multiple cultures that applies to folklore related to winter and winter holidays in general.
Kiwi Hellenist - Concerning Yule
https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2018/12/concerning-yule.html
This article breaks down specific claims about Pagan origins of Christmas customs and provides quotations of the sources to explain what we actually know about Yule and whether or not there is a possible Pagan antecedent for the Christmas customs.
Odin as Santa Claus and Other Norse Yule Myths
https://brodgar.co.uk/2020/12/14/odin-as-santa-claus-and-other-norse-yule-myths/?
Santa Claus
Santa as a variant of Odin, an agricultural titanic version of Saturn, or a Saami shaman tripping on magic mushrooms are all explanations that make the rounds when people assert the Pagan origins of Santa Claus. Nicholas of Myra, the bishop who is the patron Saint of Children and became Santa Claus, already had magical associations by the early medieval period. He was known for subduing spirits and either dispelling them or bringing them into his service, giving gifts, resurrecting murdered children, protecting sailors and travelers from storms and more. Saint Nick was a pretty magical dude and has many bases for Santa Claus built into his myth.
Modern Santa Claus didn’t really develop until the late 19th and early 20th centuries though. His costume, the reindeer, even his association with Christmas instead of Saint Nicholas day, are all pretty modern. Looking at customs for Saint Nicholas Day gives us an explanation for Christmas stockings before Clement C Moore’s Visit from Saint Nick, and it clearly echoes a story from the Saint’s early hagiography.
But is there anything to the claims of a Pagan origin? In our Yule section we provided an article that addressed the Santa claims specifically around Norse stuff, but here are some focused on Santa.
National Geographic is not great for Pagan stuff, and is honestly, kind of pop culture leaning in how it treats history and culture subjects. This article is still pretty solid. Towards the middle it temporarily turns from its focus and talks about the origins of Santa. That section is a little vague and seems mostly to be about the origin of modern Santa as distinct from earlier folklore customs. It vaguely points to Pagan influences where “folklore” may have been a better descriptor. It talks about Sinterklaas in a way that might sound like it’s referring to an earlier Pagan figure, when it’s referring to the local variant of Saint Nicholas that existed prior to the modern homogenized Santa Claus.
The major important takeaway for this article is about cultural appropriation and the damage these claims cause to the indigenous Saami people of Finland. It’s kind of a wonder that people are so excited to spread the claims that Santa is a psychedelic shaman while ignoring that the culture the claim is tied to wants people to stop making the claim. This article, therefore, presents a really great example of how these false claims can be harmful.
What does Santa have to do with Psychedelic Mushrooms?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/santa-claus-magic-mushroom-legend
Where did Santa get his reindeer? From American authors in the 19th century. This source notes the earliest example of Santa flying (which may have been a story that pre-existed the first written source, but likely not by long since it doesn’t seem to occur when he rode a white horse). It then gives the first example to mention reindeer, with a rather muddled explanation in another source of how the reindeer were added. This indicates that reindeer were not a common part of the story prior to this publication. Then it provides the first, and most famous source, to give the reindeer names. While this article doesn’t mention Rudolph, a fun fact is that Rudolph was created by a marketing agent employed by Montgomery Ward and Co. He continued as a Christmas mascot for the store for years, and the original two Rudolph stories were published as marketing for Wards. The article does dip into assumptions of Pagan origins for the reindeer but doesn’t give any evidence supporting that. It points to the use of reindeer by Saami people, and while Santa probably doesn’t come from the Saami, 19th century Europeans and Americans romanticizing a people like the Saami as a rustic, magical, winter people makes the idea of echoing their custom of using reindeer to pull sleighs as a likely, and fully modern, origin for the image.
Altogether Christmas Traditions: The History of Santa’s Reindeer
https://www.altogetherchristmas.com/traditions/reindeer.html
Coca Cola is largely responsible for cementing the imagery of modern Santa Claus. I have bought into the idea that Santa’s red and white clothes are a nod to Coca Cola, but the Coca Cola corporation has pointed out that artists depicted Santa in red prior to Coca Cola. That said, they certainly standardized it. Here is an article from the Coca-Cola corporation about how their artists helped shape Santa Claus.
Haddon Sundblom and the Coca Cola Santas
https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/history/haddon-sundblom-and-the-coca-cola-santas
Rather than taking it straight from the horse’s mouth, here is a piece by the National Museum of American History on Coca Cola’s influence on Santa and Modern Christmas
How Santa Brought Coca Cola in from the Cold
https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/how-santa-brought-coca-cola-cold
The Christmas Tree
This video features Dr. Andrew M. Henry. He is an academic working in the field of religious studies. His YouTube channel is focused on religious literacy and trying to provide a non-sectarian approach to learning more about religion in general. As such, this is a fairly good source for looking at the questions we’re asking about the origins of religious practices. He did this video focusing on the Christmas Tree and its origins in which he cites other academics and provides history regarding the earliest Christmas trees as well as regarding some of the claims people make about the origins of the Christmas tree. Dr. Henry also discusses possible interpretations of evidence rather than always saying it explicitly means one thing or another. He points to the May Pole as a possible predecessor of the Christmas Tree, which has long been my assumption as to the precursor practice. Dr. Henry points to the Adam and Eve plays as a possible origin of a public decorated tree around Christmas; he does not note the date of the Feast of Adam and Eve, which is on Christmas Eve.
The Very Recent Origins of the Christmas Tree
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m41KXS-LWsY
Saturnalia
Saturnalia might feel less familiar for a lot of NeoPagans than Yule does because many NeoPagans are used to Yule being the name given to the Winter Solstice in the modern Wheel of the Year. Historically, Saturnalia would have been a little earlier than the Winter Solstice. It also wasn’t the only Roman holiday in that part of December, so specifically borrowing its name for modern Solstice celebrations was a less obvious choice than Yule. Additionally, the British influence on early NeoPaganism means Celtic and Germanic elements will have more obvious impacts on early NeoPagan aesthetics even if Greek and Roman mythology may have been more well known and provided influences as well.
As a result, Saturnalia gets mentioned often as a source for Christmas but the specific customs which are said to have come from Saturnalia aren’t always laid out as clearly as those claimed to come from Yule. Decorating with evergreens seems to be a popular claim associated with both Yule and Saturnalia, but like Yule, there isn’t evidence that this happened at Saturnalia. Romans and Greeks both often used leaf garlands and flower garlands at holidays, often worn by participants, but sometimes decorating animals or statues. Crowns made from leaves and flowers were present in some Greek and Roman ritual customs. Saturnalia does not seem to have included these practices, at least not centrally enough for contemporary authors to have recorded it.
That said, don’t take my word for it, here are some resources on Saturnalia…including some which do show a link to a medieval custom with some Christmas associations.
Dr. Andrew Henry also did a video on Saturnalia. The focus of the video is primarily on Saturnalia and what our surviving sources tell us about it. He also notes some of the potential problems of the sources. While there isn’t a focus on comparing customs to Christmas, Dr. Henry spends a fair amount of time talking about whether or not there is a relationship between the date of Saturnalia and the date of Christmas.
Saturnalia Explained
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lsctaPJSvo
Dr. Henry discussed Saturnalia’s apparent role reversals and the appointment of a Saturnalia king as customs recorded in historical sources on Saturnalia. He did not however compare it to traditions such as the Lord of Misrule, the Abbot of Unreason, Boy Bishops, or Le Prince des Sots. These were medieval customs in which a person of inferior rank was selected by chance and placed in charge of Christmas festivities. It seems that the “Festival of Fools” was sometimes set for a few days following Christmas and sometimes the practice was part of the celebration of Christmas. The practice seems to span the entirety of the middle ages. So, unlike most Christmas customs, it seems to have begun amongst Christians while the earlier Pagan custom still existed, and spread through Europe with the spread of Christmas. While the custom died out about 500 years ago, this is one Christmas custom which seems highly likely to have been the continuation of a Pagan Saturnalia custom. Ironically, it isn’t one which is ever mentioned by people claiming Christmas is Pagan because it’s an old custom that people are less familiar with today. While it does not demonstrate that Christmas was entirely copied from or was used to replace a Pagan holiday, it is a likely example of a Pagan holiday tradition from December influencing Christian December holiday traditions.
The Lord of Misrule: English Heritage
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/members-area/members-magazine/2021/the-lord-of-misrule/
Historia Civilis presents a summary of Saturnalia activities. The site doesn’t provide the background of the presenter or what his credentials are, nor are any sources mentioned. So honestly, this is not a good source to use at all for trying to make a point about history. It is useful for us because it summarizes the holiday and its customs in an easy to follow way which isn’t encumbered by trying to provide evidence for the points made. Claims in this need to be verified against other sources, but it can be useful for introducing the holiday. There is no discussion of a relationship to Christmas. The customs described for the most part don’t match modern Christmas. Gift giving, and visiting friends does occur, but, evidence for gift giving at Christmas puts it hundreds of years after Saturnalia stopped being celebrated and as noted in other sources, customs of wassailing and various costuming and door to door travel were more associated with other winter holidays than with Christmas originally. So it is unlikely either of these Christmas customs directly link to Saturnalia.
Saturnalia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OImabGvoQNs
Like the Historia Civilis video, this video on the Feast of Fools does not provide sources but provides a nice easy to follow summary. Again, it isn’t useful as a resource for making a point about history, but it is helpful to illustrate the concept of the Lord of Misrule. It paints a picture of how such behavior played out in medieval celebrations, while also noting that it was linked to various dates and was not exclusively a Christmas tradition. It will make it very clear that the medieval celebrations would be very foreign to us today, which drives home the point that time results in huge changes to customs and cultures. Even the elements of the Feast of Fools, by the middle ages, seem to have varied in scope, execution, and focus from what they were in Saturnalia. The idea of a social safety valve seems to be a potential explanation both in the case of Saturnalia and of the Feast of Fools and also points to the Feast of Fools being more comparable to Mardi Gras or Carnivale than to modern Christmas.
The Feast of Fools
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQBdvKRb2QE
Conclusions
If there is so much evidence about these ancient holidays which doesn’t reflect Christmas customs in ancient Paganism, and if we have evidence of how these Christmas practices developed in the Early Modern and Modern eras, why do people say that these things are Pagan?
As Dr. Henry noted, the assertions that Christmas comes from ancient Germanic Paganism seems to have started with German Nationalists (white supremacists) who wanted to establish that their current culture was really tied to their “pure” German culture and not to the Semitic culture that Christianity might otherwise claim to be sourced from. These ideas were first being spread prior to the development of NeoPaganism. While Wicca is often pointed to as the beginning of NeoPaganism, it was not the only NeoPagan movement of the early 20th century. Germanic Nationalist movements also incorporated elements of Germanic and Norse religion and culture, and there were early antecedents to modern Norse religious movements in these ideological spaces.
Ideas about Christian holidays being rooted in early Germanic Pagan culture might have seemed innocuous to NeoPagans and modern Pagans who were not otherwise rooted in Germanic Nationalist ideologies. The assertion was, however, a very politicized assertion rooted in identity politics.
This is not the only source for the idea that these holidays came from Paganism. There were points where Christmas celebrations were illegal. Protestants in Scotland banned Christmas around the 16th or 17th century. Protestants in England banned Christmas in the 17th century, as did the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. These restrictive Protestant movements denounced Christmas as a Pagan sacrilege. In this usage though, Pagan did not specifically mean ancient Pre-Christian practices, but rather often referred to the decadence and ritual pomp that was associated with Catholicism. In most cases these bans did not last and we see modern Christmas taking shape by the early 19th century. If you note in Dr. Henry’s discussion of the Christmas Tree he points to an early religious writer who complained of the practice in the 17th century, but he described it as “child’s play” and noted that he did not know the origin, rather than pointing to it as Pagan. In all cases, the issue with Christian celebrations was that they were viewed as decadent distractions that took the focus away from Christ.
While people today who assert that Christmas customs are ancient Pagan customs aren’t doing it because they are German Nationalists, or because they are Puritans trying to strip Christianity of Catholic decadence, there are still tons of people keeping these baseless assertions alive. They do it because they’ve read some books, or seen some memes or TikTok videos which make these claims. They believe the claims because it’s fun to believe that you have some secret piece of information and you’re helping take down the conspiratorial stranglehold of the dominant culture by spreading these bits of truth. It’s an exciting fiction that we can all easily become part of and share in a sense of heroic excitement. For others, it’s an opportunity to feel like you’re part of a marginalized culture that has been victimized by the dominant culture, but you’re heroically surviving that marginalization and speaking truth to power by explaining that Christmas Trees are really witchcraft. It’s an easy fiction to want to adopt. But, it is a fiction.
If Christmas customs don’t come from ancient Pagan customs why do modern NeoPagans, and even some modern Pagans utilize traditions that look the same as Christmas traditions?
Think about how NeoPaganism started. It was mostly people from a Protestant English background combining elements of modern ceremonial magic, early modern magic, Western Mystery Tradition teachings and bits of folklore with an aesthetic rooted in really poor historical sources and very bad anthropological material spurred on by the concept of the “noble savage” which was still popular at the time. You can still see those influences in a lot of fakelore today.
The earliest NeoPagan traditions were closed initiatory traditions with magical rituals. Those sorts of approaches don’t necessarily build up big public holiday folklore and traditions. Folklore also works better when it develops organically out of the awareness and needs of the people. So, adopting things that already existed was the natural way for a system of lore, and elements which would be appealing to a broad public audience, to develop. The audience that NeoPaganism was exported to were also largely living in cultures which were predominantly Anglophone Protestant cultures.
Protestant mentality shapes a lot of NeoPaganism, both in terms of NeoPaganism being a contrary-response to elements of Protestant identity, as well as being informed by Protestant modes of thinking about the sacred. Customs that were associated with seasonal holidays in the dominant culture were often seasonal folk customs rather than things with an overdetermined or overt religious quality, so keeping those elements of culture was an easy way to expand the holiday aesthetic of NeoPaganism. Pumpkins as a popular Samhain decoration is a clear example of this since Pumpkins are a “New World” plant and are an American Halloween symbol which made its way back to European Halloween just like they became part of American Samhain.
In short, Modern NeoPagan Yule doesn’t look like ancient Norse Yule. We’re not sacrificing animals, spraying people with blood, and swearing oaths while drinking Horse broth. Modern NeoPagan Yule looks like Christmas, not because Christmas looks like medieval Pagan Yule, but because early NeoPagans were people who grew up immersed in modern Christmas practices. Like when Pagans converted to Christianity, and their folk customs remained by shifting into new forms which allowed them to merge with their Christian worldview, NeoPagans kept their customs and practices when converting from Christianity. The Christmas customs and practices became Yule practices in a NeoPagan context, and new meanings and explanations arose. It’s easy to believe that the practices with their new meanings were a rebirth of ancient practices that had survived hidden within a Christian context, but it’s really the opposite that is true in many cases.
So, Christmas customs that we know today are mostly modern and have nothing to do with anything Pagan, for the most part. Modern NeoPagan holiday customs are also mostly modern and don’t reflect the central elements that survive in records of traditional Pagan holidays (note: Pagan, or Polytheist communities are not intended here when I say NeoPagan, while their practices also differ from traditional ones, they draw on them more centrally in so far as one is able to in a modern context). It’s fine for these holiday traditions to be new or modern as long as people enjoy them and they provide some sort of meaning. If the gods and spirits who are honored by these holidays enjoy the modern customs, all the better.
In the end, no one has more ownership over most of these customs than anyone else. These customs don’t represent appropriation from ancient Pagans or a victimization of ancient Pagans. Modern NeoPagans don’t share a cultural continuity through which to claim some victimization or ownership even if Christians were utilizing ancient Pagan customs.
The efforts to enlighten people to the secret Pagan origins of Christmas are misguided. In part, they’re misguided because the claims are just false. If you really go through the material linked above, it would be hard for any rational intelligent person to not realize that those claims are false. Worse than them being false, they are rooted in a false narrative of cultural continuity and cultural ownership. This becomes problematic because there are living cultures descended from the cultures that people are claiming were stolen from. In some cases, this means people are making claims about living cultures and their practices that are false and hurtful - like in the case of the Saami. In other cases, you have the history of living cultures being misrepresented. The majority of descendents of those cultures still living within those cultures as they have evolved today are people who likely celebrate Christmas either religiously or secularly. So people from outside Italian, Scandinavian, and Germanic cultures are telling people within them that they are celebrating with stolen customs - I hope the ridiculousness of that is obvious. Beyond that, there are also Pagan revivals of those ancient cultures, and so the now living revived traditions are left to deal with people loudly in the media ascribing things to them that they simply don’t do.
More simply than questions of appropriation and continuity, sharing misinformation makes it harder for anyone who actually wants to learn truth. You might feel that it’s light hearted and fun and so it doesn’t matter if it’s wrong. Personally, I think that is kind of a gross and warped mentality, but I understand that some people prefer how a narrative makes them feel over the value of its veracity. Others might think it is ok to share such things even if they’re untrue because they feel it takes the dominant culture down a peg. In reality, it doesn’t, if anything modern secular society isn’t invested enough to care and so they think it’s interesting trivia that they can accept uncritically. For those that do care, it’s easy enough to show that the claims are wrong and then in turn that makes it look like Pagans and NeoPagans trade in propaganda, conspiracy theories, and uneducated claims - it makes all of us look bad. But to me, more importantly, when someone is starting out and wants to learn, misinformation builds walls, hurdles, and snares that they won’t know how to navigate at the start of their journey. It impoverishes those who want to educate themselves. That is a horrible thing to knowingly contribute to. Seekers might learn about modern practices and about historical practices and find that the modern is what’s right for them. They should have the opportunity to easily learn about both without walls of misinformation hindering them.
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