We’re about to enter what Americans, at least, call “the holiday season.” It will begin when tiny vampires, ballerinas, pirates, ghouls, superheroes, goblins, ninjas, alicorns, and witches descend upon us, demanding from us a tribute of candy. It begins with Halloween, of course, but it includes both Thanksgiving and Christmas.

It also includes Hanukkah (or Chanukah), the Jewish festival with its eight-candle menorah that will begin this year at sundown on 14 December and end at nightfall on 22 December. Hanukkah is a rabbinic holiday that commemorates the recovery of Jerusalem and the subsequent rededication of the Second Temple in the second century before Christ, at the beginning of the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire. Since this story is narrated in the Apocrypha and not as part of the canonized Christian Bible, it has not caught on among Christians.

For some African Americans, the holiday season also includes Kwanzaa, a non-religious cultural celebration that was first created and celebrated in 1966. It runs from 26 December through 1 January.

But the season begins on 31 October, and children not only across America but beyond eagerly anticipate that wonderful, haunted, and sugary night. Some adults, however, regard Halloween as a glorification of darkness and evil.

Only it isn’t. Or, at least, it didn’t originate as such. (I confess that some Halloween decorations, and some “spook alleys” and “houses of horror” do, indeed, seem to me to cross the line into the macabre and even the depraved.) In fact, the word “Halloween,” or “Hallowe’en,” is a contraction of “All Hallows’ Eve” that dates to about 1745. It designates the evening before the Western Christian feast of All Hallows’ Day (i.e., “All Saints’ Day”) — a time, in the Catholic calendar, for remembering the dead, particularly saints, martyrs, and departed Christian believers.

In the form that we know it, though, Halloween may also be connected with the ancient Celtic late-autumn festival called “Samhain” (which, despite the spelling, is pronounced roughly “SAH-win”). That holiday was celebrated in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the Isle of Man from sunset to sunset on 31 October and 1 November. It was the most important of the four “quarter days” of the medieval Gaelic calendar, marking the end of the harvest, the bringing of cattle — the main form of wealth in ancient Gaelic society—down from their summer pastures, and the coming of winter, the “darker half” of the year. Samhain was a time when fairies and spirits were thought to be particularly active, and when, the doorway to the other world having been opened, they could most easily enter ours. The souls of the dead revisited their homes at Samhain. But there was nothing satanic or intrinsically evil about it.

(For a brief sketch of the fascinating historical background of today’s Halloween, see my 2021 Meridian Magazine column “Ways of Remembering the Dead,” at https://latterdaysaintmag.com/ways-of-remembering-the-dead/.)

Do Halloween’s possibly pagan roots mean that faithful Latter-day Saints and devout Christians more generally should oppose or reject it? Some do draw that conclusion. However—although I share their uneasiness with the more ghoulish and seemingly devilish celebrations that I sometimes see—I think that they are mistaken.

After all, it’s not as if other elements of “the holiday season” don’t have pagan roots. Consider, for instance, the mistletoe, a toxic and parasitic plant that has assumed minor but amusing significance during the Christmas season. It’s an evergreen; it manufactures its own chlorophyll and can easily be seen when other plants have lost their leaves in winter. Ancient Celts associated it with human fertility and, perhaps, also with human sacrifice. The Romans connected mistletoe with love, peace, and mutual understanding and would hang it over doorways to protect the residents of a house. In one Norse myth, the god Baldur was killed by a mistletoe arrow. His grieving mother, Frigg, thereupon declared mistletoe a symbol of love and decreed that anyone who stood or passed beneath it should be kissed. Moreover, the Norse also regarded mistletoe as a symbol of peace. If enemies met under it, they were obligated to lay their weapons down and observe a truce. In medieval Europe more generally, mistletoe came to represent fertility and vitality, as well as protection from demons and witches. From there, it’s just a small jump to the custom of kissing under a sprig of Christmas mistletoe.

Consider, too, the modern Christmas tree. It originated in sixteenth-century Germany, where people decorated evergreen trees with apples, nuts, and candles for religious celebrations, a practice that had evolved from medieval plays that used “paradise trees” to depict the Garden of Eden. Some stories attribute the first use of candles in the decoration of Christmas trees—as forerunners of our own much safer electric bulbs—to the Protestant reformer Martin Luther. He is said to have been inspired by stars shining through a fir tree to want to re-create that effect for his family.

The tradition caught popular attention in England in 1848 when the Illustrated London News published an illustration of Queen Victoria, her husband Prince Albert, and their family standing around a decorated Christmas tree at Windsor Castle.  It’s probably significant that, before his marriage to Victoria, who was his first cousin, Albert had been the German prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and that Victoria herself came from German royalty both on her mother’s side and on her father’s side. In fact, her mother was born a German princess and Victoria was raised speaking German. She and Albert regularly used German with each other throughout their marriage, and it’s even possible that Victoria may have had at least a slight German accent when speaking English. In other words, it’s scarcely surprising that they adopted the German tradition of Christmas trees for their family; the Queen had probably seen such trees at Christmas time when she was a child.

In the United States, German settlers had already introduced the tradition by that time, with the first Christmas trees appearing in Pennsylvania. In 1850, however, Godey’s Lady’s Book, which was the most popular monthly magazine in America during the nineteenth century, republished that illustration of Victoria and her family, and the craze for Christmas trees spread rapidly beyond the German-American community. (Interestingly, the magazine’s powerful editor at the time, Sarah Josepha Hale, was also a major factor in the successful campaign to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday.)

But Christmas trees, too, have pagan beginnings. The tradition may have emerged from the “sacred trees” of Northern European mythology, such as Yggdrasil, the giant ash tree at the center of the Norse cosmos that was pictured as holding all worlds in its roots and branches. It is recounted that St. Boniface came upon one such sacred tree during his mission to the Germanic tribes in the early eighth century. When he encountered people who were about to sacrifice a child to the god Thor at the “Thunder Oak,” he intervened and miraculously chopped the tree down with one mighty stroke of an axe.

Many cultures, including the early Romans, Celts, and Vikings, would bring evergreens indoors during winter to symbolize life and fertility and to ward off evil spirits. And the Roman festival of Saturnalia (which ran 17-23 December) seems to have involved decorating trees with metal pieces.  It is probably their lack of explicitly Christian connections that makes Christmas trees acceptable and even popular in such non-Christian countries as Japan and Egypt during the month of December.

Moreover, the English word Christmas (“mass on Christ’s day”) is a fairly recent one. The earlier term, Yule, may derive from Germanic or Anglo-Saxon words referring to the feast of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, which, in 2025, will occur on 21 December.

Even the date on which we celebrate Christmas likely has non-Christian associations; there is probably no serious scholar who maintains that Jesus was actually born on 25 December. However, some early Christians believed that he was conceived on the spring equinox, 25 March, and, therefore, that his birth must have occurred nine months later, on 25 December. Another consideration, though, is that this date may have been chosen to coincide with—and, importantly, to replace—popular winter solstice celebrations, such as the already-mentioned Roman festival of Saturnalia. In the old Julian calendar, the winter solstice occurred on 25 December, which was the day of “Sol Invictus,” the “Invincible Sun.” This was the day when, after progressively growing shorter, the hours of daylight began again to lengthen.

So, again, do the pagan roots of some of our Christmas customs oblige us to avoid them, or even to forsake the holidays altogether?

Some make this argument. I do not. Such customs and practices have long since lost any explicitly “heathen” significance. Like the thoroughly de-christianized Santa Claus—originally St. Nicholas of Myra, a participant at the Emperor Constantine’s Council of Nicea in AD 325 who (by the way) could be decidedly unjolly—and like the elves and flying reindeer (including red-nosed Rudolph) who accompany him, they do little or no harm. Instead, they provide considerable charm and joy. To illustrate my point of view, I’ll offer a parallel case:

Many scholars believe that Psalm 29—with its imagery of a powerful storm deity whose voice shakes the earth and breaks cedars—was originally a hymn to the Canaanite weather god Baal that was adapted, repurposed, by an ancient Hebrew for the worship of Yahweh or Jehovah. In fact, several of the other psalms also seem to share religious motifs that are now known to feature in hymns belonging to the Israelites’ near neighbors and religio-political rivals, the Canaanites. In Psalm 74, for example, a divine warrior subdues the forces of chaos. Psalm 92 alludes to themes of creation and conflict that resemble the mythology of the ancient Canaanite city Ugarit. And Psalm 104 features the image of a divine “cloud rider” that has been recovered from older Ugaritic clay tablets. Even the personifications of Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly, found in Proverbs 9, may have been influenced by Canaanite or Ugaritic themes that are set forth in texts such as the “Baal Cycle.”

Do such facts require us to jettison the Psalms? No. No more than we need to drop the hymn “Do What is Right” from our worship services because its tune comes from an earlier secular song—perhaps even a drinking song—called “Oaken Bucket” or “The Old Oaken Bucket.” No more than we should avoid “Though in the Outward Church Below” because its powerful melody comes from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. “Why should the devil have all the best tunes?” The question is often attributed to Brigham Young. It wasn’t original to him, but it makes a very good point. There seems little harm, but a great deal of sound sense, in appropriating good “secular” music—along with other things—for spiritual purposes.

Ancient paganism presents little or no threat to us today. Indeed, to the extent that there is a genuine danger of heathenism in our contemporary celebrations of Christmas and the other holidays, it almost certainly doesn’t come from Baal or Thor or the Invincible Sun. Rather, the threat probably lies in our materialism and in the almost unbridled commercialism that threatens to displace Christ from celebrations of his advent.

The question is what we will make of these holidays. When St. Boniface thwarted that Germanic child sacrifice to Thor and felled the “Thunder Oak,” so the story goes, he used the wood of the tree to build a Christian chapel.