Unwrapping Christmas

Implicit Religion, 2011

The creation of a sacred Christian winter festival, a special holy day celebrating the birth of Jesus, was a gradual process of invention, adaptation, and borrowing. The sacred days marking the trial and execution of Jesus were an early development in which Easter soon established itself as the most important annual festival in the liturgical calendar. By contrast, celebrating the birthday of Jesus was a late development that had its own significance and its peculiar cultural forces. The investigation eschews the idea of a direct and single cause for an event. The emphasis, rather, is on social context and multiple causes converging at various points and places in the fourth century. [This is a slightly revised and corrected version]

2023

Folk-lore, 2019

2020

A Fridah khutbah/sermon delivered at CIVIC, Canberra, on 23 December, 2016

Social History, 2017

Insight Magazine of Council of World Mission, 2019

British Library Asian and African Studies Blog, 2019

This work appeared on the British Library's Asian and African Studies Blog on 24 December 2019. In it, I explore the story of the Nativity through the Library's Syriac collections, from manuscript versions of the Peshitta through to contemporary examples of Syriac, Turoyo and Swadaya materials focusing on Christmas.