Christmas is the holiday most often described as “a cultural season” or “just family and gifts”, and it is also the one where the most myths circulate. This page sets out what historians say about where it came from, which popular claims are false or overstated, what its customs and characters are tied to, and what scholars have said about it. It is education, not an attack on anyone. Most people who keep Christmas today see a time of family, giving and joy, and we do not question their intentions. We honor Jesus (Isa, peace be upon him) as a prophet and the Messiah, as the Quran teaches. The question here is only what the religion asks of a Muslim, and on that point we say plainly where scholars differ.
Five origins are usually given for the date and the customs. Each card carries a verdict tag, the facts as the sources give them, and a note where the sources say a claim needs correcting or caution.
The New Testament gives no date for the birth of Jesus. The earliest firm evidence for observing 25 December is the Chronography of 354, a Roman compilation. Its list of Christian feast days has an entry for 25 December, in the form “VIII kal. Ian. natus Christus in Betleem Iudeae” (“Christ born in Bethlehem of Judaea”). The same compilation’s pagan calendar also marks 25 December, with the entry “N INVICTI CM XXX” (“birthday of the unconquered, games ordered, thirty races”).
The Christian list is generally taken to reflect the practice of Rome in the year 336, which is why scholars say Christmas was kept in Rome “by 336”. That year is an inference from the compilation, not a date written in it.
One scholarly theory says the December date was reached by arithmetic, not borrowed from a pagan feast. Julius Africanus, writing in 221, apparently dated the conception of Jesus to 25 March; nine months later is 25 December. Augustine, in On the Trinity, writes that Christ is believed to have been conceived on 25 March, the day on which he also suffered, and “born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th”.
The idea behind it is that in the ancient world a great figure was thought to have lived a whole number of years, so that conception and death fell on the same date. This “integral age” idea is associated with Louis Duchesne and Thomas Talley. Nothaft defends the theory and argues that Africanus’s Chronographiae used 25 March as a starting date and may imply 25 December; the explicit statements of the date come from later chronographers.
Saturnalia was the Roman festival of Saturn. It began on 17 December and by the 1st century BC had been extended to 23 December. It had a sacrifice and public banquet, private gift-giving, gambling, a “king of the Saturnalia” and a reversal of master and slave roles. Britannica notes that gift-giving at Christmas has been linked both to the Magi and to the Roman Kalends and Saturnalia.
Brumalia was a winter festival of the eastern Roman world, taking its name from bruma, “winter solstice”. Rome itself had only a minor Bruma on 24 November. The Council in Trullo (692), canon 62, forbade Christians the “Calends”, the “Bota” and the “Brumalia”, so the church treated these as pagan feasts to avoid. Tertullian (about 200), in On Idolatry chapter 14, complains that Christians attended “the Saturnalia and New-year’s and Midwinter’s festivals”, where “presents come and go”.
The usual claim is that the emperor Aurelian made the Sun god Sol Invictus an official cult of Rome in 274 and set the festival “birthday of the unconquered Sun” on 25 December, and that the church then chose that day to compete with it. The one firm piece of evidence for a 25 December Sun festival is the 354 calendar entry in card 1. The two entries are in the same document, so it cannot tell us which came first.
Hijmans argues that Aurelian’s games for the Sun were held on 19–22 October, and that the 25 December entry is first firmly attested in 354. On his reading, the claim that Aurelian set the 25 December feast in 274 is not secure.
“Yule” is a real and old name. A Gothic calendar of about 350 has a month “before Yule”, and Bede (about 726) says the heathen English called December and January Giuli. Old Norse sources describe a midwinter feast with sacrifice and feasting. Snorri’s Heimskringla, written later, says King Hákon moved Yule to coincide with Christmas in the 10th century. Swedish Christian Christmas dates from the 12th century.
The familiar customs are attested late. The earliest documented Christmas log is a German record of 1184; Herrick wrote of the “Christmas log” in 1648. Pliny describes Gaulish druids cutting mistletoe, but the Christmas use of mistletoe is much later, and evergreens are recorded in Scandinavia as a New Year custom. Britannica says tree worship was common among pagan Europeans and survived in such customs.
Six popular claims, checked against the sources. Two of them (the tree and the Puritan ban) are not myths at all, and we include them because people ask.
Mithras is shown in reliefs and inscriptions as born from a rock, as Petra Genetrix, “the rock that gives birth”. That is not a virgin birth, and the sources do not describe one. A 25 December birthday for Mithras is not securely attested. Beck says the link rests only on the assumption that it fell on the official Birthday of the Unconquered, and Clauss says that festival was a general Sun festival, not a Mithraic rite.
The festival is far older: it is in the 354 calendar (card 1), and in the 17th century it was banned in England and in Massachusetts (card 11). What is modern is the shape of the customs. Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York (1809) pictured a pipe-smoking St Nicholas. “A Visit from St. Nicholas” appeared anonymously in the Troy Sentinel on 23 December 1823, and is traditionally credited to Clement Clarke Moore, who is said to have written it in 1822; its authorship is also disputed. Dickens published A Christmas Carol on 19 December 1843. Prince Albert helped popularize the Christmas tree in England in the mid-19th century. Thomas Nast drew Santa in Harper’s Weekly from 3 January 1863.
Coca-Cola began Haddon Sundblom’s Santa advertising in 1931. The company itself says it did not create Santa; it helped fix and spread a look that already existed.
The story says Santa’s red-and-white suit, flying reindeer and chimney come from Siberian or Sámi shamans who used the fly agaric mushroom. The sources we checked say there is no solid evidence: Sámi shamans are reported to have entered trance through music, alcohol or pain, not reliably through the fly agaric, their clothing was not mushroom-like, and their midwinter customs were not gift-giving traditions. National Geographic’s report, which features Tim Frandy of the University of British Columbia, rejects the story.
Popular articles say Santa is Odin: a long-bearded old man, riding an eight-legged horse (Sleipnir) like a sleigh pulled by reindeer, who leads the “Wild Hunt” across the winter sky at Yule. There are real fragments behind this: in some Old Norse sources Odin is given the name Jólnir, “Yule one”, and the Swedish museum notes that some scholars connect Yule with Odin.
But the picture of a single ancient Wild Hunt led by Odin at midwinter is largely a modern construction. Hutton’s 2014 study in Folklore argues that the modern notion of the Hunt was created by Jacob Grimm, who combined different medieval traditions with modern folklore. And the Swedish museum says that Santa Claus “has however nothing to do with Odin”: his origin is the Dutch Sinterklaas, from Saint Nicholas.
Britannica traces the modern Christmas tree to western Germany. A “paradise tree”, a fir hung with apples that stood for the Garden of Eden in a medieval play, was set up in homes on 24 December, the feast of Adam and Eve, and hung with wafers and later candles. By the 16th century it had merged with the “Christmas pyramid”, a wooden frame of shelves with evergreens, candles and a star. The custom was widespread among German Lutherans by the 18th century, and Prince Albert popularized it in England in the 19th.
In England, Parliament held fasts from 1644, and an ordinance of 8 June 1647 declared that the feasts of the Nativity of Christ, Easter and Whitsuntide, which it said had been “superstitiously used and observed”, were “no longer observed as festivals or holy-dayes”. Christmas returned with the Restoration in 1660. In Massachusetts, the General Court on 11 May 1659 fined anyone “observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way” five shillings. The law was repealed in 1681. Mass Moments gives the Puritans’ reason as the lack of any basis for Christmas in Scripture.
A short guide to the people and characters most often named at Christmas, and what the sources actually say about each. The first three are in the Christian story; the rest are saints, folklore and fiction.
Muslims honor Isa as a prophet and the Messiah, born miraculously of Maryam without a father, who spoke in the cradle. We do not hold that he is divine or the son of God. The main point on which the Quran and the Christian account part is his nature, and the Quran says it with respect for him and for his mother. The Quran’s account is in Surah Maryam (19:16–34) and in 3:45–47. Read it for yourself, and see the page on him on our prophets site.
Quran 19:16–34 and 3:45–47 give the Islamic account side by side with the Gospel one; the full text is at quran.com/19 and quran.com/3. Read more on Monotheistic Truth: Jesus (Isa), peace be upon him.
ThemeHe is honored, not worshipped.
Maryam is honored in the Quran: a whole surah bears her name and 3:42 says Allah chose and purified her. Joseph is not named in the Quran. Luke 2:7 says she “laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn”. The Quran has no inn or manger: in 19:23 the pains of childbirth drove her “to the trunk of a palm tree”, and a stream and fresh dates are provided (19:24–26).
Matthew and Luke name Joseph (for example Luke 2:4). The two accounts differ in detail, and each is told in its own scripture.
ThemeTwo accounts of one birth.
Matthew 2:1–2 says “wise men from the east” came to Jerusalem; the text gives no number, no names and no title of king. Gold, frankincense and myrrh are the three gifts in Matthew 2:11. The number three was inferred from the three gifts, the names Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar come from later tradition, and the idea that they were kings is also later (widely accepted by about the sixth century).
Britannica says some link the giving of Christmas gifts to the Magi, and also links gifts to the Kalends and Saturnalia; the Magi are one proposed root among several, not a proved origin.
ThemeGifts in the Gospel, a custom added later.
Nicholas was a bishop of Myra in what is now Turkey in the 4th century. Little reliable biography survives, and the stories told about him come from later writers. The famous story of the three daughters, whom he saved from poverty by secretly giving gold for their dowries, appears in the Golden Legend, compiled in the 13th century. His feast day in the West is 6 December.
Hedge anything specific: the Vatican and Britannica give a bishop of that name, but the legends are not history.
ThemeA bishop’s legend that grew into a gift-giver.
Santa Claus comes from the Dutch Sinterklaas, that is, Saint Nicholas, brought to New York and reshaped in the 19th century by Irving, the 1823 poem and Nast. Kris Kringle is an Americanized form of the Pennsylvania German Christkindl, “Christ child”, a different gift-bringer; “Christ-kinkle” is recorded in 1830. Father Christmas began as an English figure of festivity in the 17th century, for example in Ben Jonson’s masque of 1616, and was not first a gift-giver.
They were separate characters. The Victorians made Father Christmas a bringer of presents, and from the 1870s and 1880s he and Santa merged.
ThemeThree roots, one modern figure.
A horned, half-goat figure of Alpine and Central European folklore who goes with Saint Nicholas: Nicholas rewards children who behaved, and Krampus threatens or punishes those who did not. Krampusnacht is the evening of 5 December, and Krampus runs are held in Austria, Bavaria and nearby regions.
The earliest documented references are from the 16th century. Its origin is uncertain; the claim that it is an ancient pagan survival is not established, and the older Perchten masked parades were carnival-style rather than a proven pagan cult.
ThemeA scare figure beside a saint.
E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” in 1816. Alexandre Dumas adapted it in 1844, and Tchaikovsky’s ballet is based on the Dumas version. It premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg on 18 December 1892.
The story is set on Christmas Eve, but it is a fairy tale and not a folk custom.
ThemeA fairy tale that became a seasonal ritual.
The miser of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, published on 19 December 1843. On Christmas Eve he is visited by the ghost of his partner Marley and by three spirits, of Christmas past, present and yet to come, and he changes his ways.
The tale is a moral story about generosity; it is not a record of any religious practice.
ThemeA moral tale set at Christmas.
The creature of Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), in How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, published by Random House on 12 October 1957, and in Redbook magazine that December. He tries to steal Christmas and finds it comes anyway.
ThemeA killjoy whose heart grows.
Quran quotations are the Sahih International translation. Hadith are quoted in English as shown on sunnah.com, with the grading given there. We speak of Isa, peace be upon him, with respect, and where a ruling is disputed, we say so.
Scholars have given different answers, mostly on one narrow question: whether a Muslim may greet non-Muslims on Christmas or exchange gifts with them. All agree that a Muslim may not take part in the religious rites. We set out both views fairly.
A short note on other communities that hold to God’s law. We report what their own sources say, and we do not adopt their reasons.
Yeshivat Har Bracha states that the religious holidays of another religion, such as Christmas and Easter, are forbidden for a Jew to celebrate, and that a Jew may not place a Christmas tree in a home, office or store. It distinguishes civil holidays such as Thanksgiving, which it allows.
There is also a discussion of secular Christmas gifts and parties. Rabbi Dov Linzer (YCT) raises reasons to question whether such gifts and parties carry religious meaning, drawing on the Talmud’s cases of holiday gifts (Avodah Zarah 64b–65a). So the rule against the religious holiday is firm, while the secular side is debated.
Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their site says Jesus commanded that his death be commemorated (Luke 22:19–20), not his birth; that there is no proof he was born on 25 December; and that “Christmas is not approved by God because it is rooted in pagan customs and rites”. They also say they respect each person’s right to decide. Scholars dispute simple pagan-origin claims, as our history section shows.
The Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland holds the regulative principle, that worship should include only what Scripture commands, and gives “firm reasons why Christians who take a serious interest in the Bible withdraw from the festive season entirely”. The Armstrong tradition (the Worldwide Church of God and the groups that descend from it) taught against Christmas in The Plain Truth About Christmas; some of the historical claims in that booklet, such as those about Brumalia, are contested. The Puritans of England and Massachusetts banned it (card 11), as a past community.
Jeremiah 10:2–4 is often cited against Christmas trees: “Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.” Its context is idol-making (“the work of the hands of the workman”), a polemic against carved and decorated idols, not a rule about a decorated tree as such. We cite it as it is cited, and say so honestly.