i am sparticus: Part Four: In Which December 25th Barely Gets a Mentioned

Part Four: In Which December 25th Barely Gets a Mentioned

So to catch up with what's been said, first no-one seemed to care about Jesus' birth, then some people started to care about when He appeared on earth but decided that didn't happen till His baptism. Then some slightly less confused people started to connect celebrating when Jesus appeared on earth with his actual birth. Now some clever people realise that actually celebrating Jesus' baptism and His birth on the same day may not really be that helpful. Which means that Jesus' birthday celebrations get moved! Only they don't get moved to December 25th just yet. Rather logically given the normal order of birth and baptism, the celebration for Jesus' birthday get moved back to the night before the Baptism celebrations. So on the 5th January people stay up late (and in some cases all night) to celebrate Jesus' birth and then reconvene the next day for more celebrations, but this time of Jesus' baptism. On top of these two things other early stories of Jesus' appearing on Earth are also celebrated, so His much celebrated water into wine miracle gets a mention.

This is all very exciting, but it does make the January 5th/6th Birth/Epiphany festival quite full up and it still leads to confusion between Jesus' birth and baptism. Then in 325 AD the bishops of churches met together to discuss the on going problem of Jesus being fully human and fully God. After some deliberation they decided that actually maybe it wasn't such a huge problem and that the idea of Jesus being both fully human and fully God made quite good sense. So all the bishops go home feeling contented (apart from the heretical bishops who go home feeling, one can only hope, duly chastised and repentant) with how it all turned out only to realise that if they are going to clearly teach that God came down to earth in Jesus' conception then maybe they shouldn't be doing it at the same time they were teaching about Jesus' baptism. Being typical Christians they decided that as Epiphany had been around for a hundred years or so it was a tradition that was engraved in stone and could never be altered. Therefore the Christmas part of the festival had to be moved.