Decorated walls, a cake with one candle , or a number of candles symbolizing age, and the famous “Happy Birthday” song in the background, followed by the singing of the lyrics. This scene is usually repeated when celebrating a birthday, but have you ever wondered its origin And when did Christmas actually begin to be celebrated ?
Pharaonic celebration and Grec cake
Celebrating Christmas is not a modern matter, as it began in ancient Egypt and then Babylon, as it was restricted to the royal family males, and it was recorded that the first birthday celebration was in the year 3000 BC, during the celebration of the birthday of the pharaoh. However, the researchers pointed out that the celebration of Christmas was not actually taking place on the day of birth, but rather on the coronation feast.
The idea of celebrating birthdays passed from the Egyptians to the Greeks, and they celebrated the birthday of something who was famous for the crescent symbol above her head, once a month, but they did not celebrate children’s birthdays. In the Roman Empire, the Roman Senate declared the birthday of senior men. The state is an official holiday, and they also recognized the day of the tsar’s birthday as a noisy feast full of parades and celebrations, at the same time, the public celebrated their birthdays in simple ways with their families.
With the advent of the Christian religion, the first church fathers prevented the celebration of birthdays, and celebrated the day of death instead. According to their beliefs at the time, the birth of children brings sin into the world, but death is the new birth and the path to eternal life and the bliss of heaven, so it is what deserves to be celebrated.
Also, there was another reason for preventing the celebration of birthdays in the Christian religion, as these celebrations were taken from the ancient Egyptians and the Greeks, therefore they are pagan customs that must be avoided from the point of view of the clergy. The church’s prohibition of Christmas celebrations remained in place until it changed by the fourth century when it conducted an audit to determine the date of the birth of Christ (pbuh), after it opposed the attempts of some Greek historians to reach that date in the year 245. Since then, the church began the tradition of celebrating the birthday of Christ (pbuh) , after that the world returned to celebrating birthdays again.
