Wk, D6, T2 - Finalising research

Currently I am in the process of finalising my research. I have put together a book of my sources and annotated them accordingly. A number of passage/excerpts from books have been found, mainly from internet sources (due to ancient dates ie. 3rd, 4th and 12th century; and modern text - particuarly 1970s), as have a number of internet journals.

From my research surrounding Dies Natalis Solis Invicti I have discovered that the origins of celebrating christmas or the 25th of December, datas back to 4000b.c. to babylonian traditions of celebrating the sun. Similiarly Iranaian and Persian traditions of Mithian tradition also celebrate their God as the sun. This was established officially in Rome under the Solis festival (as well the Saturnian and winter solstice festivals and the later Kalende [New years] festivals). Constatine than made christiantity the official practice and began creating christian festivals. it is important to note that christians and pagans were against each other namely due to the visisbility of the Gods (according to the pagans christians were atheists because their god did not physically exist).

In order to make the conversion from paganism to christianity relatively easy, many of the christian traditions were based on pagan festivals.

The chruch however, maintains that their festivals were based on religious occurances. In particular the annotation of christ. The vernal equinox celbrated by christ also establishes christian practices when converted to the julian calender. It is also worth noting that the 12 days of christmas were also created to include the coming of the three wise men (parallels kalende). The word christmas itself was also used to promote the midnight, morning and night Christ masses.

From this research, I have decided to scrap my work on Santa Claus and focus on the conceptss surrounding the question: 'Evaluate the extent to which pagan festivals impacted the establishment of a Christian Christmas period'.

my next step is to have this research offically signed off from Mr. Vassallo tonight at the History Extension meeting, and then sometime tomorrow from Mr. Woodgate. Assuming I'm given the green light so to speak, I plan to begin writing this week, and have a first draft completed by the end of the Long weekend.