The grounds on which the Church introduced so late as 350-440 a Christmas feast till then unknown, or, if known, precariously linked with the baptism, seem in the main to have been the following. (1) The transition from adult to infant baptism was proceeding rapidly in the East, and in the West was well-nigh completed. Its natural complement was a festal recognition of the fact that the divine element was present in Christ from the first, and was no new stage of spiritual promotion coeval only with the descent of the Spirit upon him at baptism. The general adoption of child baptism helped to extinguish the old view that the divine life in Jesus dated from his baptism, a view which led the Epiphany feast to be regarded as that of Jesus’ spiritual rebirth. This aspect of the feast was therefore forgotten, and its importance in every way diminished by the new and rival feast of Christmas. (2) The 4th century witnessed a rapid diffusion of Marcionite, or, as it was now called, Manichaean propaganda, the chief tenet of which was that Jesus either was not born at all, was a mere phantasm, or anyhow did not take flesh of the Virgin Mary. Against this view the new Christmas was a protest, since it was peculiarly the feast of his birth in the flesh, or as a man, and is constantly spoken of as such by the fathers who witnessed its institution.
In Britain the 25th of December was a festival long before the conversion to Christianity, for Bede (De temp. rat. ch. 13) relates that “the ancient peoples of the Angli began the year on the 25th of December when we now celebrate the birthday of the Lord; and the very night which is now so holy to us, they called in their tongue modranecht (môdra niht), that is, the mothers’ night, by reason we suspect of the ceremonies which in that night-long vigil they performed.” With his usual reticence about matters pagan or not orthodox, Bede abstains from recording who the mothers were and what the ceremonies. In 1644 the English puritans forbad any merriment or religious services by act of Parliament, on the ground that it was a heathen festival, and ordered it to be kept as a fast. Charles II. revived the feast, but the Scots adhered to the Puritan view.
Outside Teutonic countries Christmas presents are unknown. Their place is taken in Latin countries by the strenae, French étrennes, given on the 1st of January; this was in antiquity a great holiday, wherefore until late in the 4th century the Christians kept it as a day of fasting and gloom. The setting up in Latin churches of a Christmas crèche is said to have been originated by St Francis.
Authorities.—K.A.H. Kellner, Heortologie (Freiburg im Br., 1906), with Bibliography; Hospinianus, De festis Christianorum (Genevae, 1574); Edw. Martène, De Antiquis Ecclesiae Ritibus, iii. 31 (Bassani, 1788); J.C.W. Augusti, Christl. Archäologie, vols. i. and v. (Leipzig, 1817-1831); A.J. Binterim, Denkwürdigkeiten, v. pt. i. p. 528 (Mainz, 1825, &c.); Ernst Friedrich Wernsdorf, De originibus Solemnium Natalis Christi (Wittenberg, 1757, and in J.E. Volbeding, Thesaurus Commentationum, Lipsiae, 1847); Anton. Bynaeus, De Natali Jesu Christi (Amsterdam, 1689); Hermann Usener, Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Bonn, 1889); Nik. Nilles, S.J., Kalendarium Manuale (Innsbruck, 1896); L. Duchesne, Origines du culte chrétien (3e éd., Paris, 1889).
(F. C. C.)
[1] In the Abhandlungen der sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1850). Note that in A.D. 1, Dec. 25 was a Sunday and not a Friday.
[2] In a fragment preserved by an Armenian writer, Ananias of Shirak.
CHRISTMAS ISLAND, a British possession under the government of the Straits Settlements, situated in the eastern part of the Indian Ocean (in 10° 25′ S., 105° 42′ E.), about 190 m. S. of Java. The island is a quadrilateral with hollowed sides, about 12 m. in greatest length and 9 in extreme breadth. It is probably the only tropical island that had never been inhabited by man before the European settlement. When the first settlers arrived, in 1897, it was covered with a dense forest of great trees and luxuriant under-shrubbery. The settlement in Flying Fish Cove now numbers some 250 inhabitants, consisting of Europeans, Sikhs, Malays and Chinese, by whom roads have been cut and patches of cleared ground cultivated.