You’ve probably heard the rumor - maybe you’ve even spread it yourself - Christmas trees are pagan.

This is how it usually goes: when the Christians came to Europe, they wanted to convert pagans to Christianity, so they made a conscious choice to take pagan symbols, like a decorated tree for Yule or Saturnalia or Sol Invictus or Hilaria (it changes on who you ask) and said, “This is Christian now and we will call it the Christmas tree!”

But none of this is true.

In this episode, your host Zohare Jacobi of Jewitches goes through all the holidays the tree is supposedly stolen from - Yule, Saturnalia, Sol Invictus -- and even the Yule Log -- to dig into the origins of this myth and the true origin of the tree.

You can find the citations here.

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