By Bryce Souve - Posted at The Heidelblog:
Published December 17, 2025For so many, myself included, it really is the most wonderful time of the year. The lovely smells and sights, the many feasts with family and friends—these provide us a hopeful transition from the heat of summer, lend a joyful anticipation even amidst the bitter cold, and forge deeper bonds between loved ones that extend forward into unbreakable memories. Regardless of one’s religious convictions and practices around this time, there is an obvious sharing in God’s common grace—he gives us joy amidst our toil in this life under the sun (Eccl 9:7–10). And for those who express their faith in Christ during this time of year through formal Christmas celebration, their joy abounds all the more. So many themes overlap and highlight one another, such as Christ being the sweet aroma that has ascended to his Father through the Spirit, or his being the glorious Light come to shine in this dark world, or his having secured our adoption into the family of God through the Spirit who sits us down each week to feast with our Father at the family table. Truly, the long-awaited promise of Immanuel has finally come in the incarnation of Jesus, the Son of God born of Mary, come to save his people from their sins. Indeed, let us celebrate this good news! But does this Christmas coalescence come from Scripture? How should the incarnation be celebrated? What influence should the calendars of our given culture have upon the weekly liturgy of God’s heavenly worship? What ought a pastor to do when he leads the saints in worship at this time of year? But before we dive into that, let us consider how we arrived at Christmas as we know it in the first place.
The story is complicated, but let us begin by tracing its history in Scripture. As most Christmas-celebrating-Christians would state as being all too obvious, Christmas is essentially the birthday celebration of Jesus. My Roman Catholic grandmother even used to bake a delicious chocolate cake for Jesus each year. Scripture, however, records very few birthdays at all (e.g., Gen 40:20, Matt 14:6). And when we come to the birth of Jesus, although we do receive a record of this glorious event, we are not given a prescription on celebrating it thereafter, especially not in the ways we might think of a yearly birthday celebration today. Such an act of God certainly demands our praise (Luke 2:14). Scripture does not give us the command to celebrate Jesus’ birthday annually, however, nor the date to do so, let alone the precise date of December 25 (scholars continue to debate whether it even occurred in winter at all). Thus, there is no command or record of the church celebrating Jesus’ birthday in Scripture. So where did Christmas come from then, if not Scripture?
Along with the absent record in Scripture, there is no record of Christmas in the first three hundred or so years during the post-apostolic period. The first recorded observance of Christmas on December 25 is extra-biblical, coming from the Depositio Martirum in the early-to-mid-fourth century.1 It continued to be celebrated after the fourth century into medieval Europe,2 only to be overrun by debauchery and folly and therefore canceled in mid-seventeenth-century England and America.3 It then underwent a softening charm during the Victorian era as exemplified in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843), and has transformed into our present mixture of expressions—Santa Claus magically traveling the world in a night while sipping a Coca-Cola, nativity scenes violating the second commandment,4 along with well-meaning Protestants gathering for Christmas services, giving particular attention to the glories of his incarnation.