It was the happiest and most popular of all the Roman festivals and it was eventually extended to seven days in length, running from December 17 to December 24. It was a time of unrestrained gaiety and feasting; public offices, businesses, schools were all closed in its honor; servants and slaves were allowed a period of relative freedom in which they might mingle with their masters in mutual bonhomie; gifts were exchanged. Such was the all-round benevolence of the time that a little sexual license was winked at. (It was this last that incurred the wrath of moralists and has caused “saturnalian” to refer to anything marked by orgies of drink and sex.)

By the third century of our era, however, the Roman gods were moribund, and eastern religions more and more swayed the hearts and minds of Roman citizens. Yet one aspect of the old religion remained untouchable, and that was the Saturnalia. Whatever else of their old ways the peoples of the Roman Empire were willing to give up, the Saturnalia had to remain.

The most prominent of the new religions was, for a time, Mithraism, which was a form of Sun worship. Mithraists saw in the fall and rise of the Sun the promise that after man’s death there would come a glorious resurrection. The Saturnalia suited them, therefore, and they added to it a climactic day of their own. On December 25, the day after the conclusion of the Saturnalia, the Mithraists celebrated the birth of Mithra, the symbolic representation of the light of the Sun. This great “day of the invincible Sun” was the most popular aspect of Mithraism.

The Mithraists made the major mistake, however, of excluding women from their religious rituals. The rival religion of Christianity wisely included women, which insured that while many fathers were Mithraists, many mothers were Christians, and the children were far more apt to follow their mothers’ early teachings than their fathers’ later ones.