Many of the so-called Christian festivals we celebrate today were originally pagan celebrations marking special times/days in the yearly cycle of the seasons. They were taken over by the Christians, or to be more specific, by the Catholic Church, during the second half of the first millennium AD. This is the reason why they chose to adapt the pagan holidays to suit Christianity.

First some examples

Before we get into why many pre-Christian celebrations were hijacked by Catholics, let’s take a brief look at some main examples of such ‘takeovers’.

Easter – The Spring Equinox has been celebrated by many cultures for thousands of years. Known as Osara to pagans, it was celebrated to mark the arrival of spring (a time of renewal and rebirth) and the renewed fertility of the land. When Christians took it over to commemorate the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, some of the ‘old’ traditions were incorporated into the new celebrations.

Painted eggs, for example, originated from a Middle Eastern tradition thousands of years old. The ‘Easter bunny’ is actually the product of confusion over nest eggs (forms) of wild hares in Europe. Wild hares build shapes for their young. Once the young have left the forms, these nests are often occupied by birds (plovers). Finding the eggs of these hare-shaped birds, the locals believed that the hares had left them.

Hallowe’en – Adopted in the 8th century as ‘All Hallows Eve’ (November 1 being ‘All Hallows, or All Saints’ Day), pagans celebrated Halloween to usher in winter and the Celtic New Year. Samhain, as it was and still is known to modern pagans today, is also the night the souls of people who have passed away during the year are said to wander among the living. The celebrations were meant to honor the dead and help them on their journey to the afterlife, or ‘other world’.

Christmas – Marking the winter solstice (Northern Hemisphere), pagan Yule celebrations included oranges and apples with cloves in baskets made of evergreen branches and flour-dusted wheat stalks that children carried and offered as gifts to others. The interiors and exteriors of the houses were decorated with ivy and holly in the hope that nature elves would join in the celebrations. Representing the ‘seeds of the Divine’, mistletoe was also used as a decoration.

The tasty Christmas logs we have today are a mere shadow of the original ceremonial Christmas logs, which had to be harvested from the owner’s land or presented as a gift (buying a log was unacceptable). Once the log had been dragged into the fireplace, people would decorate it with seasonal greenery, drizzle it with beer or cider, and dust it with flour before lighting it with a piece of the previous year’s log. After burning overnight, the log would be allowed to smolder for 12 days before finally being ceremonially extinguished.

If at first you don’t get it…

Sometimes adding or changing names did not have the desired effect and additional “actions” had to be taken. The introduction of All Saints’ Day in the eighth century, for example, fell far short of removing the deeply ingrained symbolism of the “walking dead” of Samhain. Honoring the saints of some new religion was, after all, something different from honoring the souls of deceased loved ones. To accommodate this, the Day of the Dead (November 2), a day when people pray for the souls of the dead, was added in the 9th century.

Why these festivals were hijacked

As early missionaries traveled the world to spread the Christian message, their attempts to suppress or subdue deeply held native beliefs, traditions, and customs met understandable resistance. In the 6th century, Pope Gregory I decreed that Catholic missionaries should try to adapt to native/pagan customs in order to make Christianity more acceptable to the natives. Adding new ‘holy days’ or simply renaming special dates on the pagan calendar and incorporating some of the original customs into the way such days were effectively made it easier for missionaries to convert the natives to Christianity.