“And please don’t give me some crap about it being Celtic in origin. I’ve researched the subject far more than you and your crackpot crowd and I can assure you that the pagan thing is total bollocks. To start with, the festival of Christmas is not derived from Yule. Yule dates back to 400 AD at the earliest, whereas Christmas is referred to in Roman records some two centuries before that. Also, the birth of Jesus is not a Christianised version of the birth of Mithras … Mithras was not born of a human mother, and his cult came much later during the Empire. There is no provable connection between Christmas and the solstice celebrated by the druids. We don’t even know if the druids celebrated the solstice because they didn’t write anything down, whereas the Romans wrote an awful lot down about Christmas. Sorry to disappoint you, Soph, but Christmas is solidly Christian with a few pagan trappings that the Victorians added because they were midwinter emblems.”