The Solstice Season

by Madalyn O’Hair

A reprint of an American Atheist Radio Series classic.

When the first installment of a regularly scheduled, fifteen-minute, weekly American Atheist radio series on KTBC radio (a station in Austin, Texas, owned by then-president Lyndon Baines Johnson) hit the airwaves on June 3, 1968, the nation was shocked. The programs had to be submitted weeks in advance and were heavily censored. The regular production of the series ended in September, 1977, when no further funding was available. The following is the text of American Atheist Radio Series program No. 30, first broadcast on December 23, 1968, which became known as “The Solstice Season Program” and was subsequently printed annually in the December issue of American Atheist during the years when it was a monthly periodical.

Someone stole something from me. I don’t like it. What was stolen from me - and from you - was one of the most beautiful holidays in the world. Robert G. Ingersoll (an American Atheist hero of earlier days) was also angry about this theft. Let me read to you what he had to say about it.

He wrote a very famous “Christmas sermon.” It was printed in the Evening Telegram newspaper, New York City, New York, on December 19, 1891. The ministers of the day attacked the newspaper and demanded a boycott of it. The Telegram accepted the challenge and set off an issue across the country. The paper printed the Rev. Dr. J. M. Buckley’s attack, and Robert Ingersoll’s answer. It developed into a real donnybrook.

Let’s hear what Ingersoll had to say:

The good part of Christmas is not always Christian, it is generally Pagan; that is to say, human and natural.

Christianity did not come with tidings of great joy, but with a message of eternal grief. It came with the threat of everlasting torture on its lips. It meant war on earth and perdition thereafter.

It taught some good things, the beauty of love and kindness in man. But as a torch-bearer, as a bringer of joy, it has been a failure. It has given infinite consequences to the acts of finite beings, crushing the soul with a responsibility too great for mortals to bear. It has filled the future with fear and flame, and made God the keeper of an eternal penitentiary, destined to be the home of nearly all the sons of men. Not satisfied with that, it has deprived God of the pardoning power.

And yet it may have done some good by borrowing from the Pagan world the old festival we know as Christmas.

Long before Christ was born, the sun god triumphed over the Powers of Darkness. About the time that we call Christmas the days began perceptibly to lengthen. Our barbarian ancestors were worshipers of the sun, and they celebrated his victory over the hosts of night. Such a festival was natural and beautiful. The most natural of all religions is the worship of the sun. Christianity adopted this festival. It borrowed from the Pagans the best it has.

I believe in Christmas and in every day that has been set apart for joy. We in American have too much work and not enough play. We are too much like the English.

I think it was Heinrich Heine who said that he thought a blaspheming Frenchman was a more pleasing object to god than a praying Englishman. We take our joys too sadly. I am in favor of all the good free days, the more the better.

Christmas is a good day to forgive and forget, a good day to throw away prejudices and hatreds, a good day to fill your heart and your house, and the hearts and houses of others with sunshine.

Would you believe that such a warm Christmas sermon could cause religious people to launch a vicious attack on a newspaper for publishing it? Ingersoll used the word “borrow.” He said that Christians borrowed the Pagan holiday. I use a stronger word. They stole it. They stole the most beautiful holiday of man - and for what?

They claim that this is the birthday of Jesus Christ. Let’s look at their scholars and their history and see if this is a fact. You most probably all know of A. T. Robertson, the late professor of New Testament Greek at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He had written a standard textbook on the so-called Broadus Harmony of the Gospels, and it is used in every school of religion across the land. In this book is summarized all the findings of religious scholarship pin relationship to Jesus Christ and, among other things, the date of his birth.

After a lengthy explanation of when Jesus Christ may have been born, Dr. Robertson set the date at - hold on now - the summer or early fall of the year 6 B.C. or 5 B.C. Did you hear that? He set the date in the summer or the fall. Recently the idea of the first week in January has gained some following. But no one who is a religious scholar any more accepts or believes December 25.

One must calculate from the possible death of Herod, or the appearance of the so-called star in the East, which could have been a comet recorded by the Chinese or a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. But the Greenwich Observatory says that the conjunction appearing as a single star was very unlikely. Or one can judge the “time of the universal peace,” that is the “time of no war” about which the heavenly host sang. But there was never any stoppage of war in that time.

One can guess from the so-called ministry of John the Baptist, or the age of Jesus upon his entry into the ministry, or the building of the Temple of Herod, or the closing of the temple of Janus, or the so-called census of Augustus Caesar. All of these lead the poor theologians in ever-increasing directions away from the idea of Christmas and the year “zero” or “one” of our present calendar.

Actually, the idea of December 25 is untenable. All the ancients in Christian history had various days for Christ’s birth. Clement of Alexandria, who was closer to that alleged event in time, said it was May 20. April 20 and January 6 have always appeared as possible dates. Why did the Christians want the twenty-fifth of December? Why that particular date? Why did they deliberately steal this very important date from the Pagans?

There are four points in our calendar which we use and which we call “Solstice” or “Equinox” points, two of each. The latter is easy: we say that the equinox is when the sun crosses the equator of the earth, and day and night are everywhere of equal length. The sun does not actually cross the equator; we all know that. But with the earth’s natural tip on its natural axis as it whirls around the sun, this seems to be so. Then, either one or the other part of our old ball of earth gets the most sun. But on these two occasions, the days are equal in length everywhere, and this occurs about March 21 and September 23 by our current calendar.

The Solstice is something different. We don’t go around the sun in a circle; we tour around it - on our earth - in an ellipse, which is a flattened circle, or oval. When we are in the points furthest away from the sun, we have another phenomenon. That, along with the 23° inclination of the earth, causes the solstices. Twice a year, when the sun is at its greatest distance from the celestial equator, about June 21 when the sun reaches its northernmost point on the celestial sphere, or about December 22 when it reaches its southernmost point, we call these moments the solstice. The solstice in December is the time when the days of the year, in our hemisphere, are the shortest.

Primitive man and Pagan man were not idiots, you know. They saw this. Apparently at the first, they feared the days would get shorter and shorter and shorter and finally - what if there were only night! What a frightening thing, when the sun was so necessary for life, from common observation. So when the day came for the sun to overcome the darkness, and for the sun to cause the days to be longer - even if just a minute longer - it meant that there was not going to be eternal night. The sun had won a fight again. Darkness had had to recede and slowly the days would get longer and longer until spring and summer, with food growing again and the life cycle being renewed again, would be everywhere on the earth.

And so every primitive culture had a festival or a feast on this day. It was celebrated in China, in India, in South America, in Mexico, in Africa, in every single place where man could watch days and nights and seasons. There were presents given on this great day, exchanged as a symbol, for the sun had brought the most precious gift of all to man: the warmth needed for life and a recycle of the seasons again. The ancient men noticed other things too. Certain trees stayed green all year round, a promise of the abundance of spring and summer to come again after winter, a reassurance that all the greens would return in their seasons. The light of the sun and the twinkling light of stars became important in symbolism as well as in fact. The mysterious parasite, mistletoe, ever green, intrigued primitive man. It all needed to be celebrated, to be noted with awe. If one could not give life as the sun did - one could give else, such as a sharing of food or the precious few personal items one had. But, above all it was a time of revelry. Life had been renewed. It was the most joyous of all human occasions. There was universal singing and dancing and laughing and well-being. It was wild and wonderful, and human and warm. It was the best of all festivals. It was the gayest of all feasts. It was the warmest and best of all collective human activities.

The Christians were no fools. If they permitted the Pagan holiday to continue to exist, it could challenge the basis of the mournful Christian religion, with its great emphasis on death. First came edicts outlawing the Pagan holiday. But nothing so wildly wonderful and natural as this could ever be outlawed. And then the solution came: incorporate it into the Christian religion. Oh, it took some time. It took many years to effect the change. It took much propaganda. It took many reprisals and sanctions against those who continued with the old festival. But, eventually the Christian religion won the day. There were changes in calendars too. When the Julian calendar was changed to the present-day calendar, Solstice - or Christmas - shifted a few days also, so that December 25, by our calendar, came officially to be designated as a Christian day. ^*

It took a thousand years, and more, to rob the people of the earth of this grand holiday and to replace it with a personalized myth story of a “new god born,” a god of a horrible, punitive, new religion called Christianity.

But, it is even easier now, with mass media. There are many of you in the listening audience old enough to remember Armistice Day. That was the day that World War I ended and it was celebrated for thirty years or more until a second world war broke out. After we veterans came home from that second war we found that there was no more Armistice Day. Instead, there was a Veterans’ Day. All the people in the listening audience tonight who are twenty-five years old or younger, never even heard of Armistice Day. They only know Veterans’ Day, for that is all that they were ever taught.

That’s how it is with Christmas. That is how it was with the Solstice. Finally, no one ever heard of the Solstice and its festivities - and everyone came to believe that the Christians were celebrating the birthday of Christ and that was all that this holiday had ever been.

But Bible scholars know better and Atheists know better and we celebrate that old and wonderful and joyous season. We even sell Solstice cards for this season of Solstice and the New Year (which, really, are both one day). Let me read to you what we print traditionally on our Solstice cards.

Joyful and cheerful, with mistletoe and signs of the season, the greetings are to wish one and all the glad tidings of a wonderful Winter Solstice season. The legend inside the card says:

December 25, by the Julian calendar, was the Winter Solstice. This day, originally regarded by the Pagans as the day of the nativity of the sun, the shortest day of the year - when the light began its conquering battle against darkness - was celebrated universally in all ages of man. Taken over by the Christians as the birthday of their mythological Christ, this ancient holiday, set by motions of the celestial bodies, survives as a day of rejoicing that good will and love will have a perpetual rebirth in the minds of men - even as the sun has a symbolic rebirth yearly.

FOOTNOTE:

^* In the Julian calendar, the winter solstice usually fell on 25 December. By the time that the change to the Gregorian calendar caused the solstice generally to move back to 21 December, Christmas had become an “immovable feast” (unlike Easter) and so it continued to be celebrated on the 25th. FRZ

Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 by American Atheists.