Dear Valere:

With all due respect to your friend, she is rather foolish and ignorant. Christmas is not a pagan holiday, nor is it rooted in paganism. That is just plain silly. How can Christmas have roots in ancient paganism when Christmas did not pre-exist the birth of Christ? Whether she knows it or not, she is implying the the Apostles and early Christians who celebrated the birth of Christ are actually pagan, or stole pagan ideas to invent a Christ myth (I will discuss this more at the end). Or maybe she just doesn't like December 25th.

Christmas is about celebrating the Incarnation, the birth of our God, the Nativity. We do not know the day Jesus was born, thus, it does not matter what day we celebrate that wondrous event, for pete sake. It only matters that we do celebrate it. What silly notions people invent. (by the way, every day of the year has some pagan connection. Even the names of the months and days are pagan. Is she going to create her own calendar to rename the months and days?

Does your friend also boycott Easter? There are pagan practices that pre-date Christianity that were celebrated around Eastertime (Spring equinox). In this case, however, the date for the Feast of the Resurrection is known by the historical time of the Passover. Thus, it is a movable Feast set on the first Sunday after the first full moon occurring on or after the vernal equinox. This was established in A.D. 325 by the Council of Nicaea.

Nevertheless, some say that Easter is a pagan holiday, and not Christian, and thus some silly people boycott Easter, too.

It is true that there are pagan resurrection myths. This is mentioned in an article in The Guardian:

The Sumerian goddess Inanna, or Ishtar, was hung naked on a stake, and was subsequently resurrected and ascended from the underworld. One of the oldest resurrection myths is Egyptian Horus. Born on 25 December, Horus and his damaged eye became symbols of life and rebirth. Mithras was born on what we now call Christmas day, and his followers celebrated the spring equinox. Even as late as the 4th century AD, the sol invictus, associated with Mithras, was the last great pagan cult the church had to overcome. Dionysus was a divine child, resurrected by his grandmother. Dionysus also brought his mum, Semele, back to life.

Is your friend to turn her back on our Lord by boycotting Easter? To be consistent with her logic, which these people never are, she needs to boycott Easter.

In addition, to be consistent, since the Cross was a pagan symbol before it was a Christian symbol, she ought to boycott the Cross too?

Some wedding customs and the wedding ring are of pagan origin, by the way.

So, let us summarize. Since your friend wish to boycott anything that has even a remote connection to paganism she will have to boycott Christmas, Easter, Feasts of All Saints, and many other Feast days, and boycott the Cross, the wedding ring, and much, much more. What silliness. It doesn't matter what ancient people used as symbols. Symbols are what we make them. Some Satanist use the Cross as one of their symbols. Are we to abandoned the Cross as a Christian symbol? If we are to do that, if we are to follow your friend's logic, Satan would love it. All he has to do is to take all Christian symbols, re-define them with evil meanings, and leave Christianity bare of any symbols at all. The idea your friend has about Christmas is not inspired by God, but by the other guy. She needs to stop letting Satan rob her of our symbols and holy days. 

As for why December 25th was chosen for Christmas, it was St. Constantine (the first Christian Roman emperor) who, in AD 336, first chose December 25th for the day of the Feast of the Nativity. This was affirmed by Pope Julius I by official declaration a few years later. 

There are several traditions as to why December 25th was chosen as the date for Christmas. A very early Christian tradition held that March 25th was the day that St. Gabriel announced to Mary that she would carry the Christ Child. This day is still celebrated as The Annunciation. If Mary became pregnant on that day, then her due date would be December 25th. 

Another tradition is that December 25th was chosen to counter the ancient pagan midwinter festivals Saturnalia and Dies Natalis Solis Invicti that took place in December around the date of the Winter Solstice.

It is common for the Church to set a Feast day on the same day as some pagan holiday as a tool for evangelization. Since the pagan societies were celebrating their various holidays for 100s or 1000s of years, in an effort to evangelize them and bring that society to Christ, the Church gave them an alternative holiday (Feast Day) to celebrate. This allowed the pagan peoples to continue to celebrate during the times of the year they normally celebrated something, but instead to celebrate Christianity. You can ask any missionary the value and wisdom of this practice. The Church meets people where they are and then leads them toward Christ.

There is also a reason why some pagan symbols, beliefs, and practices are so similar to Christian symbols, beliefs, and practices, for example, as seen in the pagan resurrection myths. Since God created man in His own image, there is a fundamental knowledge of God's existence in every soul. 

But, God cannot be known specifically unless He reveals Himself to us. He did revealed Himself to ancient Jews and for the first time we knew something about God that was more than an inherent intuition. This gave us the Old Testament.

Then God revealed Himself more completely with Jesus and the New Covenant. The result was that His Apostles were inspired in their writings that we call the New Testament, and His Church was established.

The ancient pagans did not have the advantage we do to know God from His revelation (Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition) and though His Church.

Without that specific revelation, pagan peoples only intuitively guessed what God was like, and what He wanted. Thus, the economy of God that included sacrifice, death and resurrection, and such, were only partly intuited by the pagan peoples. They did not have the benefit of and Old and New Testament, or a Church, to guide them into proper interpretations. They did the best they could with what they knew at the time.

These pagan peoples intuitively knew that God wanted sacrifice to appease the sins of the people, for example, and thus they constructed birth and resurrection myths, and many practiced sacrifice of animals and even humans, because intuition lead them to believe those things about God. But, because God has not revealed Himself specifically as He did to Israel and to the Church, they got the details and the theology wrong. This should not be surprising given they did not have the benefit of God's Word and the Church to guyide them.

Secularist like to assert that the early Christians "borrowed" these ancient myths to construct a new religion. This is blatantly false. Christians did not borrow from the pagans. Christians gave us the fullest understanding of sacrifice and other things that the pagans only saw in dim shadows. Because God revealed Himself in the fullest measure as we are going to get in this world, through His Son and His Church, the effect was the correction of the pagan's misinterpretations and the correct knowledge of who God is and what He wants from us.

This is why there are striking similarities between pagan myths and the fullness of truth that is in Christianity.

Pray for this poor misguided friend. She is spitting in the face of God and does not know it.

God Bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary