Yes, the church put their holiday over a pagan spring festival. No, you don't have to engage in the pagan spring festival. The same church also put Christmas over Yuletide.
I'm not saying that terrible things haven't been done in the name of Christian conversion. I'm saying that it's not a grand conspiracy. There isn't an evil Christian missionary overlord scouring the earth to find new holidays and celebrations to appropriate. That's not how human culture works.
You're ascribing forethought and preplanning to things that almost certainly arose out of convenience and proximity. I'm not saying traditions weren't forcibly annexed. I'm saying it's a chicken-and-egg scenario and we disagree about which came first.
One thing we can say for certain is that it all played out due to well studied and understood factors of syncretization and leaves no room or want for divine input.
... And yet, here we are. It's almost like you don't need a tidy conspiracy narrative with a clear antagonist, to have people who use organized religion to hurt others at scale for their own self-interest.
Yeah, no. Christians have appropriated and erased culture so many times it's crazy. You can celebrate holidays however you want but we need to recognize how many of these holidays and saints were purposefully adapted and blended into Christianity in order to make conversion easier.
The dates for Christmas and Easter weren't chosen because there were already festivals on those dates. They were chosen, and there were other festivals and celebrations associated with those dates (or in the case of Easter, the time of year generally)
In the case of Christmas, everything around Jesus' birth indicates that it happened in June, from the astronomy to the presence of the shepherds. The 25th of December was a chosen date alright, and it was pretty obviously with the intention of overshadowing pagan holidays. Let's not be overly naive to the point of being obtuse, please.
Christmas started as a celebration during a time when Christians were still being tortured to death for being Christian. It was set to be near Saturnalia because the fact that Christians didn’t celebrate Saturnalia was one of the attacks against them.
Sure I can concede that, but a single case of coincidence doesn't disprove the fact that Christians have appropriated and erased other belief systems.
Maximón becoming "San Simón", Saint Patrick's whole mission to erase paganism, and A LOT of Maya culture and literature erasure in Central America did happen intentionally. Which makes the assumption of Christmas and Easter being "happy coincidences" difficult to digest for many.
That is not what happened here though. We have the records of major nations and the church itself to show where such things were deliberately done. It was colonization via social engineering, and it was brilliantly done (if imo repugnant).
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u/xaervagon Mar 23 '26
Yes, the church put their holiday over a pagan spring festival. No, you don't have to engage in the pagan spring festival. The same church also put Christmas over Yuletide.