Why do we insist on celebrating Christmas at the wrong time of year?

For our wellbeing, for tradition and for the sake of Christmas card illustrators everywhere, we should shift Christmas.

One week to go. After hurtling through a blustery Advent, we’re almost at Christmas.

If Christmas were a person she’d be a big camp aunty in glitterball earrings and a towering hair-do. We need her warm embrace during winter. But every year, bless her, she gets it a bit wrong by turning up far too early.

Every eight-year-old will tell you that Christmas is about celebrating the birth of Jesus, which of course it is. But it’s also about having a great big party at the most dismal time of year. If we weren’t celebrating the birth of Jesus, we’d still be having a big winter festival of light because we really do need it.

Winter festivals famously have more ancient roots than nativity celebrations, going back millennia. In the cold, dark, lean depths of winter, our ancestors got together and celebrated enduring life by decorating their homes with holly and ivy. The celebration of new life in the nativity echoes these more ancient customs.

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And they feasted. Even neolithic people in Britain were having surprisingly epic meat-based winter shindigs, archaeologists have discovered. Unable to continue feeding all their livestock, some animals would be slaughtered and there would be a brief period of plenty – plenty of food, plenty of ale, plenty of fire, plenty of storytelling and plenty of mischief and debauchery.

The office Christmas party, turkey dinner, Christmas cocktails, tipsy grannies, dazzling garden lights: not much has changed really. Our ancestors would get it. They’d love a bit of Slade.

What this underlines is that people have always had a deep psychological need for a midwinter blowout, with feasting, conviviality and light in the darkness – something to look forward to when winter sets in and fortify us for what’s left of the sparse season. Only Christmas isn’t in midwinter, it’s too early.

Halloween is barely over and the boxes of mince pies are piling up in supermarkets. (One year I received my first Christmas press release in July.) Most Christmas markets open around November 20th, which is definitely autumn no matter how you do the maths. The build-up starts too soon.

But the real downside of Christmas is to be over too quickly, near the beginning of winter, instead of falling in midwinter when the comedown afterwards would be less harsh.

Blue Monday, the third Monday in cold, grey January, is supposedly the most depressing day of the year in the northern hemisphere. The only good weather is on Death in Paradise. Money is tight. Would we ever have heard of Blue Monday if Christmas were two weeks later? I don’t reckon we would. If Christmas were in January, with the festive season stretching beyond it, then by the time the decorations were finally away, the days would noticeably be lengthening and the early signs of spring would be upon us. Instead, many people take down their Christmas lights on January 3 and head dejectedly back to work and school with the worst still to come.

Admittedly it’s a highly northern-centric view – half of the world celebrates Christmas in full summer – but there’s already local variation in the date of Christmas so in theory we could have a new local custom.

It may be a fantasy, but wouldn’t this be better: the Christmas build-up here in the cold grey north could start in early December, the festivities could get going properly on December 25th and reach their height on January 6th. They could then run on a week or two before the decorations came down. Hogmanay would come early in the season instead of at the end. People would actually look forward to January.

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As things are, we don’t even time Christmas right for the prettiest weather. We are more likely to see snow in January and February than in December. Christmas card illustrators peddle a fantasy of Christmas that most of us hardly ever see. A true depiction would show a soggy robin sheltering from the driving rain under a plastic bag in a leafless tree.

There’s also the small matter of a lack of evidence that December 25th was actually the date of Jesus’s birth. The Bible itself provides no date for it, or even its season. It was the fourth century before December 25th was fixed as Jesus’s birthday. The date took hold in the western Roman empire and became the feast of Christmas formally in the year 350 under Pope Julius I, December 25th having already been the Roman feast of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, which was in turn the date of the winter solstice in the Roman calendar. It came at the end of the Roman winter festival of Saturnalia which funnily enough involved five days of gift-giving when people decorated their homes with wreaths. Turning it into Christmas may have been an astute attempt to encourage Christianisation. The important point for early Christians seems to have been not so much the date, but celebrating the sacred event itself.

Here’s the intriguing thing: while in Western Europe people were celebrating on December 25th, in the eastern empire they continued with an earlier tradition of celebrating Christ’s birth on January 6th. In fact January 6th is still the date that Christmas is celebrated by Orthodox Christians in some countries, including Armenia and Russia.

January 6th – Epiphany, the feast day celebrating the wise men reaching the baby Jesus – was also the culmination of Christmas celebrations in medieval Britain. People had a big knees-up on January 5th and 6th well into the eighteenth century.

In Scotland, of course, the fun police banned Christmas in practice in the 1560s and formally abolished it in 1640, but the people still had their “daft days” of carousing during the same festive period, just making the official focus New Year instead of Christmas. It’s telling that in medieval Britain, according to historians, people kept their decorations up all through January until Candlemas on February 2nd, which marked the official end of Christmas. Candlemas itself was a winter festival of light, with candlelit processions, a remarkably Christmassy end to an extended Christmas season.

Our ancestors saw the sense in extending the Christmas cheer to see themselves through the harshest days of the winter season. It might do us good to do the same.

As the song (almost) says: Have yourself a merry little Christmas, on the sixth of Jan/ Keep your decs up three weeks longer if you can.

Rebecca McQuillan is a journalist specialising in politics and Scottish affairs. She can be found on Bluesky at @becmcq.bsky.social and on X at @BecMcQ