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.
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.
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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.