Adam Ruins Everything - The Drunken, Pagan History of Christmas 

Ah, so when my grandpa and his brothers would get in a drunken brawl every Christmas throughout the 70s and 80s, they were really just being festive.

Suddenly lines like "Oh bring us some figgy pudding" and "we won't go until we get some" take on a much more ominous meaning.

and they mocked me when I said I wanted to get drunk in the woods for christmas. who's laughing now DAD?!

Five shillings... Four calling birds, three French hens, and now I have to pay the fine tooooooooooo.

Norsemen celebrates Yule: Correct Norsemen wear horned helmets: Wrong

I showed my Christian mom and she called him evil and a sinner .-.

i wish we could see the full length episodes in the rest of the world not just for people in the us

Why do I feel Adam didn't ruin Christmas at all and actually made it better lol also still showing this to friends 5 years later XD

Several Christmas traditions also came from A Christmas Carol. It not only made the holiday more popular, it also led to encouraging generosity, family gatherings, seasonal food, wishing people Merry Christmas, and gift giving, among other traditions we all know today.

As a Christian, it’s 100% true! Nothing makes my hair stand up more than “Christmas is a sacred Christian holiday!” No...it was designed to cover up the orgies, lol! I love this time of year, and it’s great for ministry, but it’s not formed by God. The only thing we’re asked to observe is communion and the sabbath day! And yes, I’m a Biblical major as well, lol! 👍🏻

Let's make Christmas pagan again! Praise Saturn!

In Ireland we've done nothing but the drunken party thing since pagan times... Solstice, Christmas, whatever... where's the vino!

Kinda knew this already I'm honestly surprised more people don't know the truth.

I did a detailed oral report on Saturnalia in the 8th grade after being assigned "Christmas" as the subject for my report; the class thought I was a crazy person, religious teacher included!

Hence the “bring us some figgy pudding” line

I thought this was a known thing Don't Americans do history in school?

2:29 Sounds like Jimmy Neutron

Adam should tell this to the war on Christmas folks who get up in arms about everything every December. Christmas is really what you make it.

And another truth is that Christmas is WAY too commercialized nowadays, greedy companies putting Christmas stuff out mid-September to get as much money as they can :)

Why Jehovah's Witnesses don't celebrate Christmas in a quick nutshell.

Isn't that old English Christmas just a harcore trick-or-treat?

I like the old Christmas better😆

Anyone else heard jimmy neutron in this

Australian Christmas is still all about drunken parties and occasional crime

Love when people disagree with someone using sources, and facts, so he has to be a far left. lol.

You missed out how the puritan leader of England Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas after winning the civil war and executing the king. He made himself the Lord Protector of England and banned the theater, drinking and made Christmas a time of fasting. But people hated fasting at Christmas so much that when he died they brought back the dead Kings son, Charles II. The Puritans disbanded soon after and many of them went to America.

let's get drunk and knock on rich people home's :D

It's still called Jul here in Denmark ^^ and it's still all about getting drunk. SO HAPPY JUL FOLKS! :D

Let's be the Christmas Grinch and deliver a knock--down of the most eggregious mistakes here: Birth of Christ being in December is unlikely, but possible. Elisabeth, the cousin of Mary became pregnant when her husband was serving in the temple. Her husband Zachariah was a priest and his time to serve was in late September. And Elisabeth was 6 months pregnant when Mary became pregnant, which would be late March. Nine months later is December. There is evidence of Christians celebrating Jesus' birth in December from the third century, way earlier than the necessity to write over a popular pagan festival was timely, so it is unlikely that the pagan celebration was the cause of the date. Also we have Christian sermons from the early to late fourth century that contrast the wild raving of the pagans with the solemn Christian holiday, meaning that both were an established custom, not trying to intentionally compete. Also, the idea that Saturnalia was replaced by Christmas to make Christianity popular was a 19th century puritan myth, hardly a rigorous and objective study on the history of the festival. Next, norse people celebrating Yule 2000 years ago is obvious bunk, we have no literary culture for those people from that period, and scant evidence. Maybe 1000 years later it was possible. I have seen no evidence.Yule was an important festivity. Saturnalia actually came to influence Christmas celebration. It was not however, a continuity from antiquity. Rather, in the High Middle Ages the interest of Roman history and custom became a fashion and they read about the old festivities of Saturnalia and decided to add a little romp and raucousness to the festivity by reviving Saturnalia customs. It was a conscious effort, not a mixup or secret paganism. The Christmas tree was adopted in Germany in opposition to pagan customs as Germanic pagans worshipped oaks and mistles, the fir tree being evergreen is a symbol of eternal life and specifically the tree of the fruit of everlasting life, as opposed to the changing oak, a symbol of the seasons and change. So that is wrong. Giving gifts was also a specifically Christian tradition, remembering the magi, and the generousity of St. Nicholas, the real life counterpart to Santa Claus. The jokey gifts given in English countries are a middle ages tradition revived from ancient Roman custom, but those gifts are supposed to be a joke, whereas the serious gifts at Christmas are a Christian tradition. Lastly, there is no American Christmas, it is just an amalgamation of English and German custom, mixed with bits and bobs here and there. Santa Claus lives in Lapland, as the North Pole is just frozen ocean that could not support hundreds of elves or workshops. And Santa was red way before Coca Cola.

This video will always have a special place in my atheist heart since it was one of the videos that opened my eyes to the lie that is organized religion 😊😊

I'm a Christian and you've just answered every question I've had. Thanks

birth of the sun of the son.... I see what you did there Christianity ;0

So the Jehovah Witnesses were right about something

This isnt completely true. As far back as the roman times, Christians celebrated christmas as a way to have their own celebration to stop Christians divulging in the pagan festivals

Where did you do your research for this? There are records from the very first Christian council showing how they chose December 25 to celebrate the birth of Christ. The Roman winter solstice was part of it, but another reason it was chosen was because it was 9 months after the Feast of the Annunciation, which is associated with Mary's conception of Jesus. The fact that some cultures happened to throw wild parties during the the winter solstice around that same time is pure coincidence.

I think I'm going to advocate against allowing people to celebrate Christmas by threatening rich people with physical violence.

Love how they're animated like The Peanuts Gang in "A Charlie Brown Christmas"! He should have also parodied the Rankin-Bass Christmas Specials with stop-motion puppets of himself and his sister!!

Most Christians know Jesus wasn't born on Dec 25th

I love this video it helps so much when I’m trying to explain it to people

Also seems like a logical thing to do that close to the winter solstice when there's not a lot of sunlight and everything is cold and dark. Why not throw a party at the darkest time of year? Makes sense to me. There's no sunlight but we can have tons of pretty lights, family, tasty food, a spirit of giving and generosity... makes it a lot nicer :)

remember to thank Scotland Ireland, Germany, and spain. For all the happy songs and too much alcohol. Without it we would still be fighting rich people.

2:11 I guess that's why they have the "figgy pudding" part in "We Wish You A Merry Christmas".

I thought this was common knowledge

Also jesus wasnt born on christmas cause it would be too cold for the Shepards to be out in the fields raising the sheep so they would have not been outside to get the socalled angel message also jesus mom would have probably had a miscarriage due to the cold and staying in a stable

Yule didn’t even begin until the 5th or 6th century. Christianity was already the state religion in Rome around that time.

#BringbackSaturnalia! Io Saturnalia!

100% truth Jehovah's witness have being preaching about this for years for more info visit Jw.org.

Somebody send this to Ken Ham

We know Jesus wasn't born in December. It would have been too cold for the shepherds to be tending their flocks at night, which they were doing when Jesus was born.

Not to mention that if you look at the stories of when Mary found out she was pregnant and when they went to Bethlehem, plus the historical records around when that tax counting took place, jesus was more likely to be born in late spring early summer.

You better watch out Adam. All the Christians are getting triggered

Honestly, this makes Christmas even better! 👍

This is one I actually knew about! The Wiccan and Pagan holiday Yule, or the winter solstice. Perfect times for doing spells because of the moon's position....

It's fun how Jehovah's Witnesses are acting so self absorbed about this in the comments as if they were something special, a lot of christians don't celebrate Christmas.

No wonder having a drunken good time at a Irish pub during the Christmas holidays felt so right,lol

Wanna know the fun part? My namesake, St. Anastasia, has her feast day on Dec 25. She was a Roman martyr who stood up to her pagan husband and the government for her faith, and was so honored by her courage (and her miraculous survival of multiple execution attempts), she’s named in the long form of the Mass. Since Christmas started being celebrated on the 25th, she just became another name no one can pronounce right :/

2:29 Is that Jimmy Neutron?

Why do we still have to pretend that we don't know this already?

This just makes christmas even more awesome now.

Every single culture on earth celebrates the winter solstice. It’s not pagan to have a holiday in winter

Adam, I wished a whole lot more people viewed the majority of your videos and became more informed about very common misconceptions. Knowledge is power and people need to change the views that they blindly believed because they were told by someone they trusted

Peppermint Patty lesbian joke.

And people wonder why Jehovah's Witnesses don't celebrate holidays...

Adam is right but doesn't go very deep into the history.. Christmas wasn't just banned in America, but New England as well, but a very long time and in 1660 Charles the II made it tradition.. The ban in America wasn't lifted until around 1680 or so and it wasn't even celebrated till the 1850's and I don't think it even became a national holiday until 1856 (could have my year wrong) and even then people still attended school and work (they didn't take days off) and they didn't even associate Christmas with Yule.. It was mostly when Irish immigrants came here during the Industrial Revolution when things changed (He did mention immigrants) and Coca Cola also decided to commercialize Santa Claus and more things became commercialized during the Industrial Revolution, including holidays and we started to incorporate more Yule traditions back into Christmas which is more or less a Norse festival.. It's definitely a white person thing and part of "white culture" whether people like that or not..

Probably not the place to share...but Exactly why I don't celebrate Christ-Mass anymore, amongst others. Just Slapping Jesus's name on several pagan festivals and calling it a Christian holiday.

2:35 JIMMY NEUTRON

HAH! We in the north *cough* sweden *cough* started it all! And its still called jul. :)

Why is she able to relate to Peppermint Patty?

Yule was rescheduled to December 25th by Hakon I. in the 10th century in order to unify his christian and pagan subjects. Other than that there isn't much known (historically) about the Yule fest before that. It is mentioned that it took place in 'midwinter'. So here we know for sure, that it was not originally celebrated the same date christmas was. And what exactly midwinter means in that source cannot be completely clarified, since the old norse probably had a solar-lunar calendar. Also we don't know how far back Yule celebrations date at all. Also the 'dies natalis solis' or birthday of Sol invictus bacame a thing over a century after christmas had already been celebrated on December 25th. It is true that since Caesar's calendar reformation already winter solstice was dated December 25th. But there is no proof of any celebration connected with the solstice itself. It used to be the day of wine god bacchus but without any big celebration around it. That december 25th became the christmas day has nothing to do with either Yule nor the dies natalis solis and the date rather connects to different ancient mediterranean birthday traditions at the time. For example it was common to celebrate the life of the deceased at their date of death whilst in judaism a person's birthday would be celebrated on the date of their conception. During the expansion of christian beliefs the two traditions merged into one another which is why the conception of Christ was celebrated on March 25th (originally associated with the date of his death around jewish pesah celebration). So mathematically his date of birth would be exactly 9 months later which is where we get December 25th.

Childhood ruined Except most of us already knew some of this stuff already................

i wanna be pagan again

Big fan of your show. However, Adam this is one thing you supposedly ruined that actually I hate to ruin back. I used to think similarly to you. But all you talked about is actually coincidence. A lot of the earliest ancient Christian writings believed Christ would die around the time He was conceived. His death was on March 25. Since conception was considered roughly 9 months, it would make sense why the Church decided to celebrate His BIRTH on December 25. Just because it happens to be close to Saturnalia does not mean they received the date from pagans, but they could have indeed adopted elements from them in order to condescend to the culture around them.

Funny... My religion told us about the reason why we don't celebrate christmas just last week and this is exactly how he told us... Only in another language. (Filipino)

2:50 jingle bells jingle bells jingle all the way elves are coming outta the boat because it’s Santa’s sleigh

‘In England, drinking mobs would take over the streets’ As an Englishman, I would like to know what the word ‘would’ is doing there

"Instead of worrying that christmas isn't christian anymore" I'm looking at you Joshua Feuerstein!

"... All crime is legal, it's purge time, baby." lol

You're a Roman Charlie Brown!

"We can estimate when Jesus was born by counting backward from his death on Passover, Nisan 14 in the spring of the year 33 C.E. (John 19:14-16) Jesus was about 30 years old when he began his three-and-a-half-year ministry, so he was born in the early fall of 2 B.C.E.-Luke 3:23."

Sometimes I watch these and wonder "How is this ruining anything? I KNEW this already by reading books, articles, and whatever I can get my hands on at school." Then I remember some people don't read and have problems having a coherent thought.

guys, no one cares if you "already knew this", these shows are for anyone who doesn't, including kids

Some of the traditional elements of the celebration of Christmas seem to have derived from Saturnalia, but to pretend the whole festival is purely from this pagan tradition is nonsense. The claim is often made that “Christmas is celebrated on December 25 because that was the Roman feast of Saturnalia”. It wasn’t. Saturnalia ran from December 17 to December 23, so it ended before December 25. And Christians were celebrating Jesus’ birth on December 25 long before their faith was legalised and they were in any position to be co-opting any pagan festivals. In the first three centuries of Christianity there were a variety of dates proposed for the birth of Jesus in early Patristic writings, ranging from April 19 or May 20 (referred to and dismissed by Clement of Alexandria - 150-215 AD) to November 17 (Clement's own calculation) or March 28 (found in De Pascha Computus of 243 AD) or perhaps April 2 (Hippolytos - 170-235 AD). But it was December 25 that eventually predominated; at first in Rome and then elsewhere in the Empire. Theophilus of Caesarea (115-181 AD) wrote that "we ought to celebrate the birth-day of our Lord" on December 25. Origen (153-217 AD) noted "there are those who have determined not only the year of our Lord's birth, but also the day .... the twenty-fifth day of Pachon". Hippolytus of Rome (170-240 AD) also gives the date as "eight days before the calends of January (December 25). All this was long before the conversion of Constantine and Christianity’s eventual usurpation of religious dominance, so it was before Christianity needed to or even wanted to take over any pagan festivals - several early Christian writers discouraged the celebration of Jesus’ birth completely, because they felt doing so was too “pagan”. So where did the December 25 date come from if it wasn’t “stolen” from Saturnalia? It seems there is a strong tradition within early Christianity that points in another and totally non-pagan direction. Within Judaism there was a tradition that prophets died on the same date on which they were conceived. Jesus was thought to have died on 14 Nisan according to the Jewish calendar. That's March 25, which is celebrated in various Christian liturgical calendars as the Feast of the Annunciation to this day - the feast of the conception of Jesus. March 25 was also thought to be the date of the Creation of the World. So if, according to this theological calculation, Jesus was conceived on March 25, when was he born? The obvious answer is nine months later: on December 25. Of course, the fact that December 25 is quite close to December 17-23 made it inevitable that the Christian festival took on many of the trappings of the former pagan one. So gift-giving, feasting, drinking and general partying with friends and family, which had all been part of Saturnalia, became part of Christmas. But several Christmas traditions which are often attributed to Saturnalia actually did not come from that festival. The Romans didn’t decorate trees, for example, despite what some popular articles claim. “Christmas” trees are a northern Germanic tradition, associated with another pagan end-of-year festival, Yule. This tradition was also adopted by Christianity in Germany and found its way to the English speaking world in the nineteenth century via Queen Victoria’s German husband Prince Albert.

Everything in this video has been proven wrong.

Nobody: Me scrolling through the comments thinking oh cool lets look at the replys bc I'm bored. The Replies: Fully blown arguments over things that slightly pertain to the original comment but not really. Also political as well.

I’m a Christian but I truly hate how Christians completely dismiss Halloween but completely ignore Christmas’ background

“A terrifying Mardi Gras”

I don't get it. He just made Christmas better.

2:30 GoTtA bLaST

Now, given this theory is still fun to think about haha. This is just untrue, y'see, we have much older evidence of Christmas on the 25th than the Roman and Norse holidays around that time. Again, this is still a very fun thing to ponder though!

There were so many holidays back then even my birthday had a Holliday of drinking. This def is inaccurate information you are spreading here. You can always ask to debate inspiration phylosophy on this topic

I think this version was modified to be "advertiser-friendly" regarding the guideline about sensitive subjects. If you saw the original CH post, the guy holding the sign "keep Saturn in Saturnalia" at 0:40 spoke, giving time to the viewer to realize the joke referring to today's protestors shouting to keep Christ in Christmas. Here, the scene is abruptly cut to keep things more to the point, like what news should be, but this is a comedy show based on surprising facts. We are allowed to be informed and to laugh to de-dramatise related tension. Personally, I prefer the original version; having a Roman speak in the scene is a good animation and storytelling choice.

This gives me a reason to get drunk on Christmas

Again, everyone knows this. It was super smart for the church to absorb these traditions and make the transition for the commons to Christianity as easy as possible. This isn't even ruining the religion: the video is basically praising it.

This is totally false, Saturnalia was actually a different time and when the pagan rulers of Rome decided to try to destroy early Christianity they moved Saturnalia to be on Christmas.

This video is great! Except for one thing: Christians (myself included) aren't celebrating the BIRTH of Jesus. We know he probably wasn't born that day of the year. "Happy birthday, Jesus" is just a phrase used to give small children a simplified understanding of what we are really celebrating: the INCARNATION. We are celebrating God becoming man so he could die for us, therefore giving us salvation, something we view as an act of great love. In a way, then, we are celebrating God's incredible love for us, not just something as trivial as a birthday.

you ARE forgetting Orthodoxy. byzantium represent

Damn, Adam, I freakin' love you, man! Every segment you do is awesome. Can't wait to keep watching more.

No wonder I don't like Christmas

2:00 - 2:16 I disagree; "do what I say or I'll hurt you," is a core christian value

0:45 you're actually not well informed about the real background of non romanic cultural fest's of that time period. There very great sharmanic rituals that don't have anything to do with a drunken festival. Next time fact check. There were rituals with amanita muscaria, which wouldn't work out with alcohol at all.