Being a former Jew, this weekend I went home to help my parents (still Jewish) to celebrate Passover. I mostly went home for the company and the Manishewitz wine. For those of you out there who aren’t Jewish or formerly Jewish, Manishewitz wine is what happens when Jews run a vineyard. The wine tastes more like grape juice than it does wine, which works perfectly because it rids your mouth of the bland food we Jews have to eat on Passover.

While home for the holiday, I began thinking about holidays in general. Aside from the reason why people celebrate holidays – which I am convinced is to drink like fishes and eat like gluttons – I began thinking about the true reason behind each holiday, i.e. the reason why we celebrate them. When you sit down for a Christmas dinner or a Passover Seder (again, for non-Jews, Seder is our way of saying, “eat till we burst”), do you really know what it is your celebrating?

Take, for example, Christmas. Christmas, as most people believe, is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. Every year on Dec. 25, Christians around the world give thanks for his birth; however, Christmas historically has absolutely nothing to do with the birth of Jesus. Here’s the story: Before Jesus and his followers were the go-to religion, ancient Romans worshipped many gods. As it would go, on Dec. 25, the ancient Romans held a holiday which celebrated what the ancient Romans thought was the winter solstice. This holiday was called “Dies Natalis Solis Invicti” or “The Birthday of the Undefeated Sun.”

The holiday itself worshipped a variety of different gods, those being the Syrian Sun God Elah-Gabal, Sol, and the God of Roman Emperor Aurelian and Mithras, a Persian God of the soldiers. The formal holiday was introduced sometime between 215-225 A.D. by Emperor Elagabalus, reaching its height in popularity some 50 odd years after under Emperor Aurelian. It wasn’t until Sextus Julius Africanus that Dec. 25 started to become associated with the birth of Christ.

A Christian historian, Sextus Julius Africanus wrote a five part series called “Chronografiai” or “A History of the World.” In it, besides from determining that Christ was born on Dec. 25, he also calculated that the Earth, at the time of Jesus’ birth, was only 5,500 years old. He calculated that Christ was born on the Dec. 25 by determining, I suppose from scripture, that Incarnation Day took place nine months before his birth on March 25.

Incarnation Day, for those of you who don’t know, was the day Mary was told that she was having a child.

Another key thing to note here is that shown in the biblical scripture, from the clothes the Magi were said to be wearing (traditional Persian dress of trousers and Phrygian hats) it would make sense that Jesus was born sometime in the summer months. For anyone who has ever been to Israel in the winter time you know that you need more then just dress pant suit with a hat to walk around comfortably.

With this being said, it is quite obvious what happened. When push came to shove, early Christians needed to find a way for Christianity to flourish; they did this by adopting the policy of, if ya can’t beat um, join um. To rid ancient Rome of its anti-Christian religions, the Church adopted the idea that its saviors birth would coincide with the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti so to win over anti-Christians.

So I am sorry to say, but for everyone who celebrates Christmas to commemorate Christ’s birth, you are really continuing the celebration of the sun and its many gods.

This misinformation is common in the celebration of a large amount of holidays. Chanukah, the Jewish holiday that runs side by side with Christmas, is said to be the celebration of the re-dedication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem after its destruction by Antiochus IV and the miracle of the oil which followed. Yet, this is not true.

The truth behind this holiday is that little Jewish kids, seeing all their Christian friends receiving presents on Dec. 25, began pouting to their parents. After years of stomping their feet and throwing their Star of David necklaces in the garbage, the kids finally won and began receiving presents. However, so to be sure that they outdid their Christ-loving counterparts, the Jewish kids demanded eight days of presents instead of one.

Note to reader: The previous paragraph is completely true.

In the end, just remember that the holiday you are celebrating is probably a big crock built around a web of lies, perpetrated by some guy looking for power.

So you see, the holidays we celebrate aren’t always clear cut. While one person celebrates because they want to honor the birth or death of a deity, another person might celebrate it because of the people it brings him or her close to. Personally, I do it for the wine. Man oh man, is that Manishewitz good.

Brad Leibowitz writes on Thursdays. He can be reached at [email protected]