[Wikipedia-l] Christmas/Yuletide

I. Christmas is the holiday previously known as Yule or Yuletide. It was a northern European seasonal festival since time immemorial. If (and only if) you consider Yuletide to have been a religious holiday, it was a NON-Christian religious holiday. But AFAIK Yuletide was a seasonal festival in the first instance -- only possibly with associated (non-Christian) religious connotations in the second instance. II. Yuletide became known as Christmas thanks to the goody old three-E-method (of latter-day Microsoft fame): Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. The Christian church of the day was running a major conversion effort. They quickly found they couldn't beat old and cherished traditions such as Yuletide. So they accepted it as a legitimate festival into the church calendar, they added Christian symbolism and merged it with Christian ideology (most notably the holiday was "calculated"/defined to match Jesus of Nazareth's birth), and finally the entire festival got usurped and monopolized by Christianity. (Yuletide symbols/traditions such as Christmas trees and mistletoe still remain. Even Santa Claus is based on a Yuletide figure, I hear.)