c. 2003 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Did you know Alabama was the first state to declare Christmas an official holiday?

That happened in 1836, 71 years before the last state _ Oklahoma _ followed suit in 1907. Christmas is the only legal national religious holiday in the United States.

While it has been less than 100 years since all 50 states recognized Christmas as an official holiday, Dec. 25 has been celebrated for centuries by Christians as Jesus’ birthday.

But until 245 A.D., when a group of scholars tried to determine the date of Christmas, the question had never been addressed, according to a 1995 article by Victor M. Parachin in the Christian Reader. However, the project by the early church theologians was denounced by a church council, which thought it wrong to celebrate Jesus’ birthday “as though he were a King Pharaoh.”

That didn’t prevent the scholar-theologians from continuing their quest to determine the day Jesus was born. They originally listed four dates _ Jan. 1 and 6, March 25 and May 20 _ as possibilities, according to Parachin’s research.

The May date was first thought to be closest to the authentic date because of the Bible’s reference in Luke 2:8 saying the shepherds were “keeping watch over their flock by night.”

Shepherds only watched over their sheep at night during the spring lambing season. During the winter, the flocks would be inside enclosed corrals without a posted guard.

Other scholars, such as Samuel Bacchiocchi, believes the date was closer to the Feast of the Tabernacles celebration, which falls in late September or early October. It is called the “season of our joy,” found in Deuteronomy 16:13-14, according to Bacchiocchi, a retired professor of theology from Andrews University, a Seventh-day Adventist school in Michigan.

It wasn’t until 349 A.D. that Dec. 25 was formally chosen as Christmas Day by Pope Julius. The date was already celebrated as the Natalis Solis Invicti in honor of the sun god, Mithras, by Roman citizens. They decorated their homes with greenery, exchanged gifts and gathered for festive meals on that date, observed just after the winter solstice.

Many scholars believe Pope Julius picked Dec. 25 as Christmas Day to convert followers of Mithras, in addition to providing Christians with an opportunity to celebrate Jesus’ birth.

Christmas continued, however, to be a contentious issue.

In 17th century England and early America, English Puritans said the Bible offered no clear basis for celebrating Jesus’ birth. In 1643, the English Parliament outlawed not only Christmas, but Easter and other Christian celebrations.

But by 1660, Christmas had become such a popular holiday, the law was repealed.

After the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, their English misgivings about Christmas celebrations continued. In 1659, people in Massachusetts who celebrated Christmas were fined. The law was struck down in 1681 because the popularity of observing Christmas had grown immensely.

However, Christian groups remained divided over whether Christmas should be celebrated because of its ties to pagan observances. The Lutherans, Dutch Reformed, Catholic and Anglican churches forged ahead with the celebrations while the Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers and Puritans continued to rail against it.

Even today, some Christian groups, including many Churches of Christ and Seventh-day Adventists, do not acknowledge Christmas as a religious observance. However, most do recognize it as a secular holiday.

“It is very unlikely that Dec. 25 is actually the birth date of Christ,” said Huntsville (Ala.) Church of Christ minister Byron Laird. “The birth of Christ is something we all believe in, but we do not celebrate it as a religious holiday. However, many, or most (Church of Christ) families do celebrate it as a time of exchanging gifts and getting together.”

Bacchiocchi wrote in a 2000 newsletter that, while growing up in Rome, his Adventist family regarded Christmas as “a Catholic festival.”

Even when he came to America to attend Andrews in the early 1960s, Bacchiocchi said he “doesn’t recall much Christmas decorations and celebrations in the churches I visited.” But he noted that tradition gradually changed over the past four decades as more and more Adventist churches added candles and decorations during the Advent season.

Bacchiocchi believes a more simple celebration of Jesus’ birth “would be more in keeping with the setting of his birth.”

DEA END RNS