31 thoughts on “Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Halloween”

    1. 25 December (Christmas) is an ancient Roman feast day, namely – as the day of the winter solstice – the birthday of ‘Sol Invictus’. However, I do not know what Easter is derived from.

        1. The origin of Easter is well known. Although the dates have diverged, it is clearly based on the Jewish festival of Passover, or Pesach and in many countries, the name for Easter is derived from Pesach.

          1. AIUI, “Easter” is likely named after Ashtoreth / Ashtaroth / Astarte / Ishtar, the Canaanite goddess of both love and war (go figure). She was also plausibly YHWH’s wife in his pre-monotheistic days — no self-respecting god was without at least one wife.

    2. I guess that’s the point of the cartoon – that Jesus is wrong to think of them as Christian festivals. Although I suppose they *are* Christian festivals, in terms of how they are celebrated today, even if they’re plainly based on pre-Christian festivals.

      Not sure about Halloween. Is it based on harvest festival? It’s definitely a Christian name, but the way it’s celebrated doesn’t reference Christianity.

      1. I don’t know, Eastern is very much not Christian if judged by how it is celebrated today. At least where I live (Central Europe) _all_ the Eastern volk-traditions are from the pre-Christian fertility practices. (And in English and German they even kept the name.)

      2. Hallowe’en means the eve of All Hallows Day, which is the first day of Allhallowtide, the period of the Christian year devoted to remembering the dead.

        The fact that the older Gaelic Harvest Festival celebration of Samhain takes place on the same day is no coincidence. As usual, the church seems to have usurped a pagan institution that had been going on for centuries.

        1. t the older Gaelic Harvest Festival celebration of Samhain takes place on the same day is no coincidence.

          I’d be surprised if Samhain took place on the 1st November given that November is a Roman month and the pre-Christian Celts would likely not have known what “November” was.

          A quick perusal of Wikipedia tells me that Samhain was first attested in the Ninth century which is long after the Celts were Christianised.

    1. Wrong on both counts. Anglo Saxons aren’t the only people to celebrate Christmas and Easter. In fact both festivals predate the Anglo-Saxons.

  3. But easter and christmas are only the cristian versions of pagan festivities similarly associated with the change of season and “jesus” did not object to being associated with those.

  4. The myths of a deity taking on human form (Christmas) and a deity dying and rising from the dead (Easter) are steeped in ancient pagan beliefs. Many Christians don’t realize they’re participating in pagan rituals.

  5. The cross-quarter days (“Candlemas (2 February), May Day (1 May), Lammas (1 August), and All Hallows (1 November)”) are roughly halfway between the solstices and equinoxes. They were thought by the Irish to be times when the barrier to the spirit world was thinnest. All Hallows (ghosts, spirits) fits the bill; also Candlemas (translated to Groundhog Day in the US) was a time for predictions, using the wisdom of the spirit world.

    They had groundhogs in America, not badgers, which were the preferred animal in Germany.

  7. It’s early here and I’ve had no caffeine so please forgive my denseness but where is the humor in this cartoon? So what if a holiday for one group of people morphs into a differently purposed holiday for their neighbors? Thus it was ever so. When I was a child celebrating Christmas or Easter I didn’t give a hoot in a hat if my friend celebrated some other holiday on the same day. Or the same holiday on a different day, which happened when I lived in Greece. That piqued my curiosity about history and the world. So I’m missing the humorous point of today’s cartoon. Diet Pepsi here I come.

    1. The humor is the surprised look on Mo’s face. He knows where those
      festivals originally came from.

      1. Thank you Mike. I’m obviously humor impaired this morning. Hope my brain improves before too long. 🥴

  8. wah- wah- wah- WAHHHHHHH

    … I think the humor is the last panel – a deadpan Mo, whose view we apparently are looking through…. or something.

  9. It is probably easier to gain adherents and avoid conflict when newer traditions are at least to some extent, at least initially, continuous with, and built upon, the preceding traditions of the local population. The cultural appropriations within Christianity taken from the pagan holidays and traditions are pervasive, Christianity is built on a mix of Judaism and paganism. Judaism also appears to contain cultural appropriations from older religions and traditions and then subsequently evolved away from its multi-theist (multi-tribal) origins in an effort to consolidate and unify the population under one roof (and also to self depict itself as “better” than the competition). By the time Christianity took root Judaism was probably already mutually exclusive with paganism and could not go “backwards” to reach out to the local pagan populations the way that Christianity did, ultimately giving Christianity an advantage that it sucessfully exploited.

  10. If you assume Xmas and Easter are Christian, perhaps the joke is that Jesus refuses to celebrate them simply because they are not his own. Why be so egocentric?

  13. Suzi, Matthew G and Steve O all make the cogent point: Religions appropriate already-established practices, but give them new meaning. It’s the validity of the new meaning that should be judged. Mohammed’s knowing look is historically accurate but spiritually irrelevant. I sum up the insight of the three correspondents who beat me to it: The cartoon betrays ‘genetic fallacy.’

  14. Surely it is obvious to everybody that Easter cannot possibly be based on any kind of pagan Anglo-Saxon festival. The festival dates back much further than the conversion of the Saxons to Christianity and its name in most languages derived from “Pesach”. e.g. Pâques, Pasqua, Pascua. This is obvious when you understand that Easter celebrates the last week of Jesus’ life and his alleged resurrection which took place in the lead up to Passover.

    Christmas is more tricky because it has no obvious midwinter event in the life of Jesus to latch on to, however, if you are trying to identify some specific pagan event that was hijacked, it’s difficult because there are objections to all of the obvious candidates.

    1. Both Pesach and Easter are keyed to the first full moon after the northern spring equinox, except, in the case of the former, when the Jewish calendar inserts a leap month. I’m sure your explanation is correct. The use of the moon to date Easter, which therefore moves in time with Pesach, is conspicuous. I can’t think of any other recurring calendar event in Christianity, secular or religious, governed by the moon.

      Today we think of anniversaries (of marriages, birthdays, deaths, V-E Day, expiry of insurance policies, tax deadlines) as literally an exact year from the last one. Early Christians didn’t seem to care if they celebrated Christ’s resurrection exactly on the anniversary. If you couldn’t read a calendar you wouldn’t keep one. The easy way to figure out when Easter was coming around in spring was to ask your Jewish neighbours when they were going to be celebrating Passover, and plan for the Sunday of that week. Illiterate people wouldn’t even know if it had been a year exactly.

      Wikipedia recounts the controversy, often bitter, in the early organized Church about the correct way to fix the date. But it’s doubtlessly based on Pesach.

  16. From an Islamic point of view, Christianity compromises monotheism with polytheistic (and thus “pagan” like) beliefs (shirk) because they consider Jesus as god. Thus the astonished reaction of Mo to his Christian pal’s strong disavowal of pagan polytheism.

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