I think one of my biggest frustrations with the whole “War on Christmas” phenomenon is when people pretend it’s new. Check this out:

The end of the ancient Roman year contained a five-day festival called Saturnalia, in which wealthy Romans would drink to excess, have celebratory parades, give gifts, and engage in all sorts of unseemly behavior in honor of the god Saturn. As Christianity became first tolerated and then widely accepted in the early 4th Century, Pope Julius I chose to place the celebration of Jesus’s birth smack dab in the middle of the Saturnalia festivities. Whether early Christians intended Christmas to be a more peaceful alternative to Saturnalia or a full-on rebellion against it, Christmas and Saturnalia congealed together, so we’ll call this first squabble a draw.

As Christianity expanded into northern Europe, holidays like Yule and Solstice brought their own charm to the Christmas season. Because of the popularity of the famously generous St. Nicholas in northern Europe —not to mention the neat ways he dovetailed with local figures like Krampus, Knecht Ruprecht, and eventually Father Christmas—, Nicholas’s feast day on December 6th started to become as big a deal as Christmas. While Nicholas had never been officially canonized as a saint, the influence of Dutch traders and their beloved Sinterklass (“St. Nicholas” in Dutch) put the church in a tough spot, so the celebrations of St. Nicholas continued with the church’s blessing despite Nicholas not being a 100% legit Catholic saint. In the 12th Century, French nuns began leaving out treats in Nicholas’s name on December 6th, and the practice spread quickly. Score one for Santa.

Protestant reformer Martin Luther loved Christmas itself but saw St. Nicholas’s festival a few weeks before as a stumbling block. Wanting to downplay a Catholic sort-of-saint’s involvement, Luther proposed an alternative: It wasn’t St. Nick who left out treats on the 6th; rather, the Christ child gave them out on the 25th. Luther’s Protestant contemporaries largely accepted the substitution, but the German name for “Christ child” (Christkindl) gradually morphed into “Kris Kringle,” which became another name for St. Nicholas. In his attempt to quiet down St. Nicholas, Luther only moved St. Nick’s celebration to Christmas Day itself. In the battle of Protestants vs. Santa, this round went to Santa.

Of course, then the Puritans came along. By the 17th Century, English Christmas’s Saturnalia roots were shining through, with drunken parties and festivals becoming the norm. When the pious Puritans arrived in New England, part of their throwing off of the Old World included banning the celebration of Christmas altogether. While Christmas was again legalized by the 1680s, more traditional Puritans maintained a disdain for the pagan-infused holiday well into the 19th Century. Following the Civil War, Christmas became a recognized national holiday, so it seemed Christmas had finally won Christianity’s war upon it.

But then something peculiar happened.

Over the past century and a half, Christmas has inhabited a strange tension of being both a religious and secular holiday. Though technically a Christian festival, Christmas hasn’t always been well received by Christians due to its pagan influences, so when modern Christians talk about “putting the Christ back in Christmas,” this is revisionist history. It would be more accurate to say Christians and Christmas have enjoyed intervening periods of peace and tension, and the debates we see now have been bubbling away for about 1700 years.

So is there even really a “War on Christmas”? Well, kind of, but it’s not Christians saving Christmas from secularism; it’s Christmas seeking out its own identity. With every culture it encounters, Christmas changes a little. As it is today, the holiday melds together components of Christianity, European folklore, and American consumerism while being celebrated a little differently all over the globe. Maybe instead of declaring yet another war, we should see where this changing holiday takes us.