Do they know it's Christmas?

• Published date: 08 January 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

CHRISTMAS has become known as a season of merriment that all over the world; people celebrate it with joyous abandon even among people for whom the reason given for all the celebration is irrelevant. Just to be clear, the much vaunted reason for Christmas is that people are celebrating the birth of Jesus, the son of God who was made flesh and came to dwell among men as a mere mortal. This is as good a reason for celebration as any other and nobody should find any fault with that even though there are some Christians, or perhaps more appropriately, theologians who have been persuaded to refuse to join in the festivities associated with Christmas because they claim that there is no Biblical support for all the merry making. After all, nobody quite knows exactly when Jesus was born. Some have even pointed out that the date agreed upon was suspiciously close to the accepted date of the winter solstice in the Northern hemisphere and Christmas in that case did not have its roots in the birth of Jesus. For those who may be wondering about the significance of the winter solstice, it is appropriate to point out that it it is the shortest day of the year and falls on the twenty-first day of December every year. More interestingly is the fact that the winter solstice, according to the Julian calendar introduced by Julius Caesar fell on the twenty-fifth of December which according to the extant Gregorian calendar is Christmas day. This event has been associated for a few thousand years with the beginning of another year and the return of the sun to the Northern skies, erasing the fear that the sun which had been waning over the last six months beginning with the summer solstice, the longest day of the year on the twenty-first day of June had so that the cycle of life which guaranteed normality in human activity would continue for another year. It has to be pointed out that people living close to the roof of the world feard that the rebirth of the sun in their skies could not be taken for granted. This fear was so great that in those far off days, human sacrifices were carried out as a supplication to the gods to bring back the sun at its appointed time.

The dependence of humans on the presence of the sun in the sky became total with the discovery of agricultural science a little over ten thousand years ago. Before then, mankind had wandered through the world known to them living off the land as hunters of game and gatherers of edible plants in order to survive from...