The winter solstice season is pagan in origin: Rome co-opted the bacchanalia of the winter solstice and inserted the presumed birth of the Messiah, producing Christ-mass. Christmas cannot be defended from the Bible, since it rests on the traditions of men rather than on any instruction from God. Because no central authority remains to define it, Americans quarrel yearly over Santa Claus, gifts, mistletoe, and consumerism, and each person has a different reason for the season. Without authentic biblical roots, nothing exists to say one interpretation of a pagan celebration is more right than another, in contrast to the clear instruction God gave for His annual holy days. Traditions are not inherently evil, but sin enters when what man has always done is given more credence than God's instructions. Humans are not free to worship God however they see fit; the story of Cain and Abel shows that He rejects worship contrary to His instructions. God has defined worship as being in spirit and in truth (John 4:24), yet truth is absent from Christmas, and its spirit does not reflect the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23. Whether the cultural fight is waged by retailers, Christian boycotters, or secularists, Satan is the real winner. The season, with or without a religious veneer, is about man insisting on doing things his own way without regard to truth.

Christmas is a custom tied to the winter solstice, and that pagan origin remains even though people today do not normally connect the two. Jeremiah 10 describes cutting down a tree, decorating it, and setting it up, a custom associated with the signs of heaven (verses 2-3), and this accurately describes the Christmas tree. Though the passage applied to idol carving in Jeremiah's day, the book is primarily prophecy written for the modern world and its common customs, just as Jeremiah 7:18 points to hot-cross buns at Easter and Ezekiel 8:16 points to worship resembling sunrise services. Setting up a tree this way is called the way of the Gentiles (heathen), and God commands His people not to learn or follow that way. The passage shows that using a tree in this manner is idolatry, which breaks the commandment against idols in Exodus 20:4-6. Anyone who tries to honor God through an idol or icon is guilty of breaking that commandment.

December 25 has traditionally been the day pagans marked the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, and sun-god worshippers venerate it every year. Egyptians celebrated Horus' birthday on that day, and the Mesopotamians, ancient Greeks, and Persians also worshipped their gods then. Winter solstice traditions stretch back long before Jesus Christ entered the world. Rome's weeklong Saturnalia, December 17-25, ended on the solstice date with the celebration of the birth of Sol Invictus (the Invincible Sun). After Constantine, the Catholic Church let pagans keep their festival by declaring December 25 to be Jesus' birthday, replacing the sun celebration, yet little changed in practice. Jesus was not actually born then; the biblical clues, calculated from the priestly course of Zacharias, point to the second half of September, around the fall holy days. Rebranding pagan sun worship as worship of the Son of God violates God's command in Deuteronomy 12:30-31 not to inquire after the gods of the nations and serve the LORD in their way. People cannot make the unclean clean or the unholy holy, so nothing about Christmas is righteous.

The Winter Solstice occupies a central place in explaining the pagan roots of Christmas. Christmas traces its origins back to ancient Rome, where a winter festival called Saturnalia was observed near the winter solstice around December 21st, marked by gift giving and feasting. Several hundred years later, Germanic peoples contributed the tradition of yuletide, which added evergreen trees and lights meant to overcome darkness and ward off evil spirits. This twelve-day celebration began around December 20th and ended near the modern New Year, and it specifically marked the return of the sun following the solstice. As Christianity spread through Europe, the Catholic Church found itself unable to stop its members from continuing these pagan observances tied to the solstice season, so instead it blended in the concept of the birth of Jesus Christ, assigning December 25th as His birthday to absorb the existing traditions. This historical process is why modern Christmas customs, such as Santa Claus modeled after the Norse god Odin and Christmas lights originally meant to ward off evil spirits, are directly descended from solstice-related pagan practice rather than from any biblical instruction. This origin matters because it exposes the fundamental lie at the heart of a holiday that 93% of Americans celebrate, spending enormous sums of money and effort on a tradition rooted in sun-worship and evil-spirit warding rather than truth. Since God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth, He would not command anyone to observe a holiday built on falsehood. The solstice origins of Christmas illustrate why the world cannot recognize this deception: without God's calling and the Holy Spirit, people's minds remain closed to obvious truths, just as Isaiah prophesied that hearts would grow dull, ears hard of hearing, and eyes closed. This blindness explains why even sincere, Bible-literate individuals who accept teachings like the Sabbath can simultaneously embrace a holiday whose roots lie in Saturnalia and yuletide sun-worship, unable to reconcile the contradiction. Understanding the solstice-based origins of Christmas reinforces the necessity of guarding one's calling once God has opened the mind to truth. Recognizing that the holiday's core elements, timing near the solstice, evergreen and light traditions warding off spirits, and the later Christian veneer placed over it, are all pagan in nature strengthens the resolve to remain set apart from worldly celebrations. This knowledge becomes part of the broader charge to hold the line against peer pressure, protect children from compromising traditions, and remain diligent in growing one's calling rather than drifting back toward practices with no genuine connection to God's truth.