Sunday 31 December 2023
From the CBS news website on birthdays.
Why do we celebrate birthdays?
The idea of celebrating the date of your birth is a pagan tradition. In fact, many Christians didn't celebrate birthdays historically, because of that link to paganism.
Pagans thought that evil spirits lurked on days of major changes, like the day you turn a year older.
The ancient Greeks believed that each person had a spirit that attended his or her birth, and kept watch. That spirit "had a mystic relation with the God on whose birthday the individual was born," says the book The Lore of Birthdays.
• Why do we blow out candles on our birthday?
The candles were a response to the evil spirits. They showed up to communicate with the gods. A light, in the darkness.
Church Father origen against birthdays
.of all the holy people in the Scriptures, no one is recorded to have kept a feast or held a great banquet on his birthday. It is only sinners (like Pharaoh and Herod) who make great rejoicings over the day on which they were born into this world below (Origen, in Levit., Hom. VIII, in Migne P.G., XII, 495) (Thurston H. Natal Day. Transcribed by Thomas M. Barrett.
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