December

Roman December belonged to Saturn. The Saturnalia, opening on the seventeenth and sprawling across the following week, was the most beloved festival of the Roman year, the one Catullus called the best of days: courts and schools closed, gambling was licensed, masters waited on their slaves at table or dined with them, and friends exchanged gifts of wax candles and small figurines. The festival's inversions and its lights in the darkest week of the year gave later Europe a pattern of midwinter festivity that outlived the god entirely.

On the twenty fifth of December the calendar of 354 records the birthday of the Unconquered Sun, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the feast of the solar cult that the emperor Aurelian had raised to imperial rank in 274. The same calendar records, on the same date, the earliest secure evidence for the celebration of Christ's nativity in Rome. How the two feasts are related has been argued for three centuries and is still unsettled: one school holds that the church placed the nativity to claim the sun's birthday, another that the date was calculated independently, nine months from a March conception, and the sources do not decide the question. What is certain is that the sun's turning and the nativity have shared the date ever since, and preachers from Augustine onward made the coincidence a sermon, Christ as the true sun rising in the world's midwinter.

December's name, from decem, ten, marks it as the old year's last numbered month, the end of the count that began in March.

Sources Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price with Chronography of 354 (Calendar of Filocalus)Compiled by Furius Dionysius Filocalus, The Origins of the Liturgical YearThomas J. Talley

Nearly every December observance is a festival of light against the year's longest darkness. Christmas on the twenty fifth anchors the month for the Christian world, with Advent leading in, the twelve days of Christmastide flowing out, and Las Posadas, the Mexican novena from the sixteenth to the twenty fourth, walking Mary and Joseph's search for shelter from house to house each evening. Three days before Christmas week begins, Our Lady of Guadalupe on the twelfth of December commemorates the apparitions of 1531 on the hill of Tepeyac and the image on Juan Diego's tilma, the devotion at the heart of Mexican Catholicism and, by papal declaration, of the Americas as a whole.

Hanukkah, the eight night festival of lights, remembers the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem in 164 BCE after the Maccabean revolt, one lamp added each night; it begins on the twenty fifth of Kislev and falls wholly or partly in December in most years. The winter solstice itself, on or near the twenty first, is Yule, the old Germanic midwinter whose name survives in the Yule log and in the Scandinavian word for Christmas, and modern Pagans keep the solstice as the Wheel of the Year's station of the sun's rebirth, the longest night turning back toward light.

The month, and the year, close with thresholds: Watch Night services on the thirty first carry congregations across midnight in prayer, and the secular new year inherits the shape of every vigil that came before it.

Sources The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) with Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797Stafford Poole, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd editionMichael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.)