Christmas
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Christmas. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the festival of the Nativity of Christ observed by the Christian Church yearly on the 25th of December. Augustine considered the festivals, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, As cension Day, and Whitsuntide, as the on'y festivals which had an Apostolic origin and the sanction of a general council. Christmas he deemed to be of later origin and lesser authority. When the first efforts were made to fix the period of the year when the advent took place, there were, as we learn from Clement of Alexandria, advocates for the 20th of May and for the 20th or 21st of April. The Oriental Christians generally were of opinion that both the birth and baptism of Jesus took place on the 6th of January. Julian I., Bishop of Rome from A. D. 337-352, contended for the 25th of December, a view to which the Eastern Church ultimately came round, while the Church of the West adopted from their brethren in the East the view that the baptism was on the 6th of January. When the festival was at length placed in December, it afforded a substitute to the various nations who had observed a festival of rejoicing that the shortest day of the year had passed, besides spanning over the great interval between Whitsuntide of one year and Good Friday of the next. Coming to the Roman Christian converts, in lieu of the saturnalia, to which they had been accustomed while yet they were heathens, its purity became sullied almost at the first by revelry which had crept into it from this source. Similarly the Yule log, the mistletoe, etc., among English-speaking peoples, are relics of Druidism. See CHRISTIAN ERA.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
the anniversary of the birth of Christ. It is observed on the twenty-fifth day of December-one week before the New Year. The celebration dates from the fourth and fifth centuries. Among the Romans certain Christian practices were adopted from an older pagan feast in honor of the birth of the sun or Sol. Among people of Germanic ancestry, including the English, the celebration of the Christmas season, with holly, mistletoe, wassail, and the Yule log, are relics of an old pagan festival commemorating the shortest day of the year. The custom of making presents at Christmas time is associated in the popular mind with the gifts presented to Christ by the Wise Men of the East; but in reality, at least so far as English-speaking people are concerned, it is derived also from an old heathen usage. The custom of decorating Christmas trees has been traced from Rome to Germany, from Germany to England, and from England to the United States . The prejudice against Christmas observance, as too strongly tinctured with the heathen tradition, was so strong in Scotland that, until recently, children in Presbyterian families had no Christmas. Even yet it is not a popular holiday in Scotland. In New England at an early day, it was considered inappropriate--irreverent--to celebrate Christ's birthday with feasting, gift giving, and jollity. See St. Nicholas; Holly ; Mistletoe ; Santa Claus I heard the bells on Christmas Day, Their old familiar carols play, And wild and sweet The words repeat Of peace on earth, good-will to men. --Longfellow.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both entries treat Christmas as a Christian veneer over pagan midwinter rites — Collier's calls the Yule log and mistletoe "relics of Druidism" in 1921, and Aiton's derives the December date from a Roman feast of Sol. Modern scholarship keeps the Sol Invictus argument alive but sets beside it the "calculation hypothesis," which dates the Nativity nine months after the 25 March feast of the Annunciation; the specifically Druidic link is now regarded as an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarian invention rather than evidence. Aiton's 1910 note that Christmas "is not a popular holiday in Scotland" has been overtaken outright: Christmas Day only became a statutory holiday there in 1958, and Scotland now keeps it as fully as England. The Christmas tree's route is also redrawn — not Rome to Germany, but sixteenth-century Rhineland and Alsace, spread to Britain in Victoria and Albert's day and to America largely by German immigrants.
Written for this edition, 2026.