Early Christians had a soft spot for pagans
It's a mistake to say that our modern Christmas traditions come directly from pre-Christian paganism, said Ronald Hutton, a historian at Bristol University in the United Kingdom. However, he said, you'd be equally wrong to believe that Christmas is a modern phenomenon. As Christians spread their religion into Europe in the first centuries A.D., they ran into people living by a variety of local and regional religious creeds.
Christian missionaries lumped all of these people together under the umbrella term "pagan," said Philip Shaw, who researches early Germanic languages and Old English at Leicester University in the U.K. The term is related to the Latin word meaning "field," Shaw told LiveScience. The lingual link makes sense, he said, because early European Christianity was an urban phenomenon, while paganism persisted longer in rustic areas.
Early Christians wanted to convert pagans, Shaw said, but they were also fascinated by their traditions.
"Christians of that period are quite interested in paganism," he said. "It's obviously something they think is a bad thing, but it's also something they think is worth remembering. It's what their ancestors did." [In Photos: Early Christian Rome]
Perhaps that's why pagan traditions remained even as Christianity took hold. The Christmas tree is a 17th-century German invention, University of Bristol's Hutton told LiveScience, but it clearly derives from the pagan practice of bringing greenery indoors to decorate in midwinter. The modern Santa Claus is a direct descendent of England's Father Christmas, who was not originally a gift-giver. However, Father Christmas and his other European variations are modern incarnations of old pagan ideas about spirits who traveled the sky in midwinter, Hutton said.. We all want that warm Christmas glow
But why this fixation on partying in midwinter, anyway? According to historians, it's a natural time for a feast. In an agricultural society, the harvest work is done for the year, and there's nothing left to be done in the fields.
"It's a time when you have some time to devote to your religious life," said Shaw. "But also it's a@ period when, frankly, everyone needs cheering up."
The dark days that culminate with the shortest day of the year ­— the winter solstice — could be lightened with feasts and decorations, Hutton said.
"If you happen to live in a region in which midwinter brings striking darkness and cold and hunger, then the urge to have a celebration at the very heart of it to avoid going mad or falling into deep depression is very, very strong," he said.
Stephen Nissenbaum, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist "The Battle for Christmas" (Vintage, 1997), agreed.
"Even now when solstice means not all that much because you can get rid of the darkness with the flick of an electric light switch, even now, it's a very powerful season," he told LIveScience. The Church was slow to embrace Christmas
Despite the spread of Christianity, midwinter festivals did not become Christmas for hundreds of years. The Bible gives no reference to when Jesus was born, which wasn't a problem for early Christians, Nissenbaum said.
"It never occurred to them that they needed to celebrate his birthday," he said.
With no Biblical directive to do so and no mention in the Gospels of the correct date, it wasn't until the fourth century that church leaders in Rome embraced the holiday. At this time, Nissenbaum said, many people had turned to a belief the Church found heretical: That Jesus had never existed as a man, but as a sort of spiritual entity.
"If you want to show that Jesus was a real human being just like every other human being, not just somebody who appeared like a hologram, then what better way to think of him being born in a normal, humble human way than to celebrate his birth?" Nissenbaum said. [Religious Mysteries: 8 Alleged Relics of Jesus]
Midwinter festivals, ith their pagan roots, were already widely celebrated, Nissenbaum said. And the date had a pleasing philosophical fit with festivals celebrating the lengthening days after the winter solstice (which fell on Dec. 21 this year). "O, how wonderfully acted Providence that on that day on which that Sun was born … Christ should be born," one Cyprian text read. The Puritans hated the holiday
But if the Catholic Church gradually came to embrace Christmas, the Protestant Reformation gave the holiday a good knock on the chin. In the 16th century, Christmas became a casualty of this church schism, with reformist-minded Protestants considering it little better than paganism, Nissenbaum said. This likely had something to do with the "raucous, rowdy and sometimes bawdy fashion" in which Christmas was celebrated, he added.
In England under Oliver Cromwell, Christmas and other saints' days were banned, and in New England it was illegal to celebrate Christmas for about 25 years in the 1600s, Nissenbaum said. Forget people saying, "Happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," he said.
"If you want to look at a real 'War on Christmas,' you've got to look at the Puritans," he said. "They banned it!" Gifts are a new (and surprisingly controversial) tradition
While gift-giving may seem inextricably tied to Christmas, it used to be that people looked forward to opening presents on New Year's Day.
"They were a blessing for people to make them feel good as the year ends," Hutton said. It wasn't until the Victorian era of the 1800s that gift-giving shifted to Christmas. According to the Royal Collection, Queen Victoria's children got Christmas Eve gifts in 1850, including a sword and armor. In 1841, Victoria gave her husband, Prince Albert, a miniature portrait of her as a 7-year-old; in 1859, she gave him a book of poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
All of this gift-giving, along with the secular embrace of Christmas, now has some religious groups steamed, Nissenbaum said. The consumerism of Christmas shopping seems, to some, to contradict the religious goal of celebrating Jesus Christ's birth. In some ways, Nissenbaum said, excessive spending is the modern equivalent of the revelry and drunkenness that made the Puritans frown.

a-sassy-black-lady :

So?

What is Christmas today? Is it a pagan holiday? No. Well, smart business men are getting really close, but not yet.

Edit: I also dislike posts that have been entirely copied and pasted. Especially ones with no spaces between paragraphs.

Txgangsta :  *Gasp!* You have spaces between your paragraphs!  CopyPastaaa!  ;D  

The distracting man-made elements surrounding Christmas (the tree;  Christmas father; reindeer etc.) might be from pagan origins, but the true celebration and heart of Christmas is pure Christian.  The birth of Christ.  The true Savior of the world and the only One that can give everlasting life.  All the other bells and whistles surrounding the festive season is unimportant.  Please, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with having a Christmas tree, but don't forget what it's really about.  
The irony is that Jesus might not have been born on the 25th of December.  I've done some "research" on the subject of Christ's birth date and this is what I have found and no, I have not eaten copypasta so I will present this as far as possible in my own words  

The exact year and date of Christ's birth is still debatable.  We as westerners chose 25 December to celebrate the birth of Jesus, because the early church in the West seemed to have celebrated Christ's birth on the 25th.  On the other hand, the church in the East celebrated it on the 6th of January.  Both of these practices did not begin until 300 A.D. which is of course much too late to be precise as to the exact date of Christ's birth.  Also, on the 25th of Dec., Romans celebrated the Saturnalia festival.  This was when the sun would turn northward again and the festival was called Sol Invictus which means the "Unconquerable Sun."  The Christians at that time wanted to replace the pagan festivals with Christian festivals and since Jesus was commonly called the  "Son of Righteousness", it seemed "natural" to celebrate this date as the birth of the Son of Righteousness rather than celebrating the Unconquerable Sun in the sky.  Therefore, the selection of December the 25th as the date of Christ's birth, was probably a matter of substitution of the Christian festival for a pagan festival.

The exact date of Jesus' birth is nowhere stated in the New Testament.  It is most commonly believed that He was born sometime during either the fall or winter with mid-winter being a popular view.  December 25th could have been the exact date when Jesus was born, but there is not enough evidence to be certain.  One objection to the date of December 25th is that the shepherds were tending their flocks by night when the announcement came of the birth of Christ.  The argument goes that it would've been too cold for them to have had their flocks outside during winter.  Therefore it must have been some other time of year.  This doesn't hold much weight though.  Apparently there is evidence, both ancient and modern, that flocks stayed outside year round.  There is a passage in the Jewish Mishnah (Shekalim 7:4)  that stated that some sheep were kept outside of the fields of Bethlehem all year round.  Therefore, it is possible that the birth of Jesus could have come on any day of the year.  To this very day, shepherds in the Bethlehem area, keep their flocks out at night during all times of the year.  It would therefore not be impossible for the birth of Jesus to have occurred during the winter season.  Based upon present evidence, a mid-January in 2 B.C. is a preferred date for the birth of Jesus.  However, this is by no means certain.