The First Christmas Celebration
On 25 December 336 Rome’s believers celebrated Christmas Day – the earliest recorded use of that date as it spread across Christendom.
When was Christ born? Early opinion differed. Clement of Alexandria, at the turn of the third century, thought it was 20 May. The first recorded celebration of 25 December doesn’t arrive until 336 in an almanac that lists Roman holidays and the city’s consuls and prefects.
It also lists martyrs. At the top of that list is the date 25 December: ‘natus Christus in Betleem Judeae’, the text runs. One theory is that the date was chosen because it was the pagan solstice festival of Sol Invictus. Another has it calculated from 25 March, the date of the Annunciation.
By 380 the day was being celebrated in Constantinople, when St Gregory of Nazianzus, soon to be the city’s archbishop, recalled how ‘at his nativity we duly kept festival, both I … and you and all that is in the world and above the world’.
But it was still new in Antioch in 386 where Christ’s baptism was celebrated on 6 January. St John Chrysostom found his congregation resistant. In a sermon delivered on Christmas Day itself, in words to warm any historian’s heart, he argued that there was documentary proof: the census undertaken by Cyrenius, mentioned in Luke’s Gospel, could still be consulted in the Roman archives.