When December 25 Is Not the Day: The Hidden Politics of Christmas and Sacred Time

By Ephraim Agbo 

For most of the commercial world, Christmas is a reliably scheduled event: December 25 appears on calendars, in marketing plans, in airline peak-season pricing, and in municipal holiday notices. That apparent uniformity, however, conceals a far older plurality. For millions of Christians the “day” of Christ’s birth is not December 25 at all but January 6, January 7, or other liturgical moments. Those alternative dates are not quaint relics; they are traces of theological argument, imperial contestation, and cultural resistance. Read together, they tell a different story about Christianity—one in which questions of time, authority and memory have always been as important as questions of creed.

The calendar as ecclesial border

The split between December 25 and January 7 is mostly a dispute about calendars—but calendars are never merely neutral instruments. The Julian calendar, instituted under Julius Caesar in 45 BCE, governed Christian liturgical life for centuries. When Pope Gregory XIII introduced reforms in 1582 to correct the Julian calendar’s drift against the solar year, the change looked like a technical correction. In practice it became a marker of obedience and identity. Accepting the Gregorian reform was, implicitly, to accept the authority of Rome; rejecting it was a way to preserve ecclesial autonomy.

When Eastern Orthodox churches continued to mark December 25 according to the older Julian reckoning, their Christmas fell on what the Gregorian calendar names January 7. That difference is not a dispute about theology or about a precise historical day of birth so much as a symbolic refusal to let Rome’s institutional reforms redraw the contours of spiritual life. The calendar thus becomes a boundary marker—visible, repeatable, and impossible to reduce to mere nostalgia.

January 6: the older feast and a theological rhythm

Long before December 25 became the dominant Western practice, January 6—Epiphany or Theophany in many eastern traditions—was the principal feast marking God’s appearance in history. In early Christian communities around the eastern Mediterranean the date commemorated not only the nativity but also the baptism and the first public manifestations of Jesus. That theological breadth matters: Epiphany understands the Incarnation less as a single narrative of a child in a stable and more as a composite event of revelation.

Some ancient churches never separated the nativity from Epiphany. The Armenian Apostolic Church, for instance, preserves January 6 as its primary celebration of Christ’s coming. To do so is to insist that the feast is fundamentally about revelation—the “showing” of God to the world—rather than about domestic imagery, carols, or manger tableaux. That emphasis reshapes the theological texture of the season: less sentimentality, more liturgical gravity.

Genna and ascetic resistance

Ethiopia’s Genna, observed on January 7 by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, illustrates how liturgical time intersects with spiritual practice. Genna is the culmination of a long fast—commonly observed for forty-three days—characterized by prayer, ascetic discipline and communal liturgy. The fast’s trajectory reframes Christmas: the feast is not an endpoint that justifies abundance, but the liturgical reward of prolonged interior preparation.

Viewed in this light, Genna functions as a counterweight to the consumerized season prevalent in much of the West. It asserts that the birth of Christ should provoke transformation in the believer’s life—discipline, sobriety, charity—rather than merely trigger commercial exchange. Observing a different calendar here is inseparable from observing different spiritual rhythms.

December 25 as political strategy

The eventual triumph of December 25 across vast territories was not an inevitable triumph of theology. In the fourth century the Church’s adoption of December 25—apparently to align with Roman festival dates such as Dies Natalis Solis Invicti—was a strategic act of inculturation. By overlaying Christian meaning on established civic rites, church authorities made Christianity legible within the empire’s public culture. As Christianity became the empire’s dominant religion, that public calendar hardened into default practice, and through centuries of European expansion the Western date spread far beyond Europe.

Seen this way, December 25 carries an imperial residue. Its worldwide dominance owes as much to the historical reach of Rome and later Western powers as to any intrinsic theological claim. Churches that continue to observe alternate dates thereby preserve liturgical memories that grew up outside or alongside the imperializing rhythms of Rome and its successors.

Sacred time versus global time

Our age of instantaneous communication and standardized timekeeping makes divergent sacred calendars strikingly visible. Digital calendars, multinational corporations, and secular school systems operate on a single, coordinated schedule; religious communities that adhere to different liturgical clocks perform an act of temporal disobedience. This is not mere provincialism. It is a claim that sacred time is not reducible to the synchronized demands of a global market or a shared media calendar.

Importantly, multiplicity in celebration does not imply theological fragmentation. Those who observe Epiphany on January 6 or Julian-Christmas on January 7 confess the same creeds and share the same central doctrines as those who celebrate on December 25. The rift is over authority—who decides the rhythm of worship and which historical memories are authoritative—not over the center of the faith.

Memory, identity and the politics of liturgy

Dates enshrine memories; liturgies institutionalize identity. Choosing a day to celebrate the Incarnation is simultaneously an act of historical memory and political self-definition. For minority communities, for churches that survived conquest, colonization, or ecclesial marginalization, maintaining a distinct liturgical calendar is a tangible way of safeguarding a communal narrative against assimilation. For churches aligned with Rome’s reforms, agreeing to a common date facilitated administrative unity and cultural integration.

These choices have consequences beyond the church door. They shape national holidays, public schooling, and the seasonal economy. They determine whether a child in Lagos or Lviv sees Christmas trees in the street in late December or whether their season’s climax arrives in early January. Those differing chronologies subtly structure social life and public memory.

Conclusion: plurality as witness

The multiplicity of Christmas dates ultimately reframes the question from “When was Christ born?” to “How does a community remember and make holy a decisive event in human history?” In that question the variety of calendars is not a weakness but a testimony to Christianity’s historical resilience and cultural adaptability. Each date—December 25, January 6, January 7—carries its own set of memories, priorities, and theological emphases. Taken together they resist the notion that there is a single, global way to honor the Incarnation.

If anything, the coexistence of these calendars should invite humility. A faith that proclaims a God who entered a specific moment in history can acknowledge multiple ways of commemorating that entry without dissolving into relativism. The different Bethlehems of the Christian world—fixed to different places on the calendar—are not competing claims to truth but distinct testimonies to the same event: a reminder that sacred time, like sacred memory, is practiced as much as it is proclaimed.