Christmas carols, for example, started out as a pagan winter ceremony called “wassailing” to help fruit trees survive the winter and insure a good harvest the following year.

Who invented Christmas? Historian Lucy Worsley traces the roots of Christmas by exploring the Anglo-Saxon tradition, wassailing where people sing to the apple trees to celebrate the winter solstice.

With the arrival of Christianity, many of the pagan traditions were adapted and Christianized. The celebration of the winter solstice was transformed into Christmas, and the Yule log became a ...

History tells us that the celebration of Christmas as the birth of our savior, Jesus, was initiated in the fourth century as Roman Christians appropriated the pagan festival of “Saturnalia ...

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Angels We Have Heard on High; A Child Is Born; You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch; In the Bleak Midwinter; Jolly Old St. Nicholas; We Three Kings; Have a Holly Jolly Christmas; Ave Maria; Winter Wonderland ...

Like many European Christmas traditions, the burning of the Yule Log is based on ancient pagan rituals – in this case, the celebration of the Winter Solstice just a few days before Christmas.

Christmas is a Christian celebration of the birth of Christ, though it also encompasses Greek, Roman and pagan traditions of giving gifts and feasting around the Winter Solstice. It is a time when ...

Dressed in pagan folk costumes, Latvians gather on a square in the centre of Riga for a ceremony that some historians see as the ancient precursor to the Christmas tree tradition. But these ...