The Myth of Christmas: A Personal Journey

Growing up in a devout Muslim household, we never celebrated Christmas. No tree. No Christmas Eve dinner. No presents on Christmas morning, in the US or the Middle East.

We did, however, indulge in Boxing Day discounts.

The South Asian in us couldn’t resist a good deal, not even my father, a man of strict financial discipline and practical advice. I distinctly remember traveling on Christmas Day more than once — mostly to Pakistan to visit extended family — when flights were cheaper then, and practicality always won.

My experience with Christmas was distant, and yet, somehow, deeply familiar.

I felt like I knew Christmas —not because I lived it, but because I saw it. Christmas movies rolled into my elementary school classrooms every year on clunky TVs and VCRs: Home Alone 1 & 2, Miracle on 34th Street, The Muppet Christmas Carol, and others. Whenever one of those beasts rolled in, you knew it was going to be a good day, and I reveled in the sights, sounds, and merriments of the holiday spirit.

So I “knew” Christmas long before I ever experienced it.

When I eventually moved back to the United States, I began living inside the holiday, and I wanted in — fully. I put up a tree simply because it was fun, festive, and felt seasonal. And I went hard.

Trees went up right after Halloween, deceptively early, I know. Ideally one waits until after Thanksgiving, but I kept mine up until March. The red lights of Christmas worked nicely through February, the season of love and rebirth, and the green of the tree felt right for March, the beginning of spring.

I was, admittedly, a bit of a fiend. I spent sleepless nights getting every ornament on the tree just right, sprinkled all sorts of trinkets around the house, and even wrapped pillars — and whatever else I could find — with bright flashing Christmas flights.

My parents were bemused. My mother would make a face when she visited. My father would chuckle quietly and retreat to a book. They never put up a tree themselves, never allowed one in their home, but they never stopped me from having one in mine.

Others were less amused.

“This is a Christian thing,” people would say. “We’re Muslim. We don’t do that.” To which I’d reply: Christians are just celebrating the birth of Jesus, Īsā al-Salām — one of Islam’s most beloved prophets — on Christmas.

That usually led to other objections regarding images icons, and idolization of divine and holy figures, all of which are strictly forbidden in Islam. Fair enough, but I wasn’t putting up statues of baby Jesus, I was putting up a tree!

And the tree, it turns out — like so much of Christmas — didn’t even start with Christianity.

Long before the birth of Christ, ancient Europeans marked the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, with festivals centered on light, renewal, and survival. The Celts built great monuments like Newgrange and Stonehenge to commemorate it.

By the 3rd century CE, the Romans formalized this moment as the death of the old sun and the birth of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. Fixed on December 25, a few days after the winter solstice on December 21, it marked the visible return of the light.

Sol Invictus — like most gods of the ancient world — was a mix of many gods. He was a syncretic deity to unify the empire’s disparate religions into one unified being representing the power of imperial authority. Helios from Greece, Mithras from Persia, Elagabal from Syria, Shamash from Mesopotamia, and Ra from Egypt all fed into this divine being.

A century later, when Christianity needed a date for the birth of Christ — the Light of the World — December 25 was irresistible. The symbolism already worked, the date was already sacred, and it was an easier to transition to force on a pagan population.

This occurrence wasn’t unique to Christmas. Sacred days of other ancient faiths were also fused into a religious framework to merge old beliefs into the new: Hallow’s Eve from Samhain, May Day from Beltane, Easter from Passover, to name a few.

Religions don’t survive by erasing culture. They survive by building on what came before. Islam itself understands this. Muslims commemorate Ashura — the day God saved Moses and his people — because the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ learned of it from Jewish tradition and affirmed that Muslims have affinity to Moses as well.

This type of continuity becomes even clearer when Christianity moved north, into the Germanic and Nordic world — a landscape where winter was long, brutal, and sacred.

Here, the winter solstice was known as Yule, and riding through the sky was an old, white-bearded figure who watched over humanity, judged behavior, and rewarded the worthy. Children left offerings for his flying horse. Gifts appeared by morning. Sound familiar?

That figure was Odin.

And the evergreen tree was sacred to him, not only because he hung from one — Yggdrasil — to attain some of his power, but because it symbolized that life that does not die in winter. Its power was supernatural as living proof of sacred continuity. In fact, the evergreen tree has been associated with divine power for over 12,000 years, with burials and references to it tied to cosmic or divine order across the world!

That symbolism mattered to me because the tree wasn’t necessarily a theological statement, it was a seasonal one. As Muslims, we are taught to celebrate the changing of the seasons, finding spiritual lessons in them and remembering the power of the divine. That’s what ancient people did with the evergreen tree and the winter solstice, and so I felt comfort in doing something similar with a Christmas tree on Christmas.

Similarly, long before Christianity, people brought evergreen branches into their homes, decorated them with offerings, and gathered around them as a form of hope. The practice was later formalized in the 16th-century when German families began bringing entire fir trees indoors and adorning them with candles representing stars and divine light.

So when Christianity encountered these traditions, it didn’t destroy them, it just adopted them. This same process also created Santa Claus, a figure much like Sol Invictus.

Santa’s earliest roots likely lay with the indigenous Sami people — the shamanic cultures of northern Scandinavia. The Sami practiced animism, revered reindeer as sacred animals that guided between worlds, wore red and white ritual clothing, and believed that sacred spirits entered homes through smoke holes at the top of their dwellings. They also practiced seasonal redistribution of food and supplies, taking care of those less fortunate during the harshness of winter.

This shamanic layer fed Nordic myth, which shaped Odin, the winter judge who started giving Santa more shape to the figure we know today. Even Odin’s eight-legged horse, Sleipnir, survives as Santa’s eight reindeer. Rudolph wasn’t added until 1939.

Odin was then merged with Saint Nicholas — a real 4th-century bishop from modern day Turkey known for secret gift-giving and radical charity. Over the centuries, he shifted from a church figure to a folk visitor, appearing at night and rewarding good children. By the 1500s, Protestants started attacking saint veneration, so Saint Nicholas was suppressed.

But he carried on in the Netherlands as Sinterklaas, a cultural figure who brought gifts to children, carried a great book of deeds, and left treats in shoes by the fireplace. He also rode a white horse, just like Odin.

Dutch settlers carried him to New Amsterdam, now New York, where an American poet, Clement Clarke Moore, famously reshaped him in “A Visit from St. Nicholas” — making him plump and jolly, giving him eight reindeer to pull his sleigh, and sending him down chimneys to deliver gifts to children.

Thus, Santa Claus was born!

And once Coca-Cola got their hands on him, they didn’t turn him red from his forest green, as pop culture believes. They just standardized his red coloring because it fit their brand, and in typical hyper-capitalist fashion, amplified him for mass marketing to help sales.

But through it all, from the iterations of this figure, one thread remained: generosity.

The Sami redistributed food to the needy. Odin rewarded the worthy. Saint Nicholas gave secretly to the poor. Charity mattered deeply to both Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.

So as we celebrate Christmas, we should remember what we’re partaking in, consciously.

If Christmas means generosity, warmth, charity, and care for the vulnerable, I’m all for it. Every culture that contributed to Christmas or Santa Claus — Egyptian myth, Greek lore, Roman ritual, Nordic myth, Germanic tradition, Christian theology — celebrated a strong sense of community giving during humanity’s darkest season.

But if Christmas means blind consumption and worship of excess, then we’ve lost the plot.

I still celebrate most years, while also donating to charities during the holiday season. I didn’t put a tree up this year — that fervor leaving me some after many years of it — but I’ve still decorated the house with garlands, wreaths, and festive ornaments.

Now when people still mention how strange it is that a Muslim celebrates a Christian holiday, I gently remind them that Christmas doesn’t belong to one tradition; it fits squarely in the realm of world mythology.