For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Just as regularly as the approach of Christmas means an increase in the number of advertisements for perfume on television, so also it means that anti-Christian sceptics will proclaim that Christmas was originally a pagan mid-winter festival which Christians appropriated for their own nefarious purposes when they became the dominant religious force in the Roman empire from the fourth century AD onwards.
There are two problems with this claim.
The first is purely logical. Whatever religious festivals non-Christians may or may not have celebrated in the Roman Empire, one thing we can be absolutely certain about is that they did not celebrate Christmas. The clue is in the name. The word Christmas means the liturgical celebration (‘mass’) held to mark the birth of Christ. Non-Christians did not have such celebration for the simple reason that they were non-Christians.
The second is that there is no early evidence that the early Christians chose to celebrate the birth of Christ on what we call 25 December in order to displace a pagan midwinter festival.
Read it all (and see also this great article referenced in Davie’s piece.
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