Question: Should we celebrate Christmas or we should not celebrate because it's paganism?
I posted this previously. December is a very possible time for his birth. Shepherds keeping watch over their flocks is the key to the time frame. End of October through April is the rainy time of year around Jerusalem. The temperature there is moderate. The rain produces lush grass for the sheep to eat. Thus being in the field with their sheep.
http://nabataea.net/birthdate.html
Excerpt from the site.
Here an authority of no mean standing tells us that in the dry summer season the hills are well-nigh bare, affording insufficient pasture, so the shepherds then normally keep their sheep near the town and enfold them at night. But when the winter rains fall, the hills become clothed with grass, and the shepherds, knowing this, take their sheep further a field. Then, because it would make the sheep walk too far to reach the folds every evening, expending energy needlessly, they simply watch their flocks in the fields all night. This seems to be precisely what the evangelist Luke describes:
"And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night" (Luke 2:8). The shepherds were not in the town; the flock was not in a fold in or near the town. They were afar in 'the field' or common pasturage. The sheep were taken there only in the winter, when the winter rains brought forth grass on the hills.
Another authority of the highest rank, Dr. Alfred Edersheim, who considers it likely that the angel appeared to the shepherds at the traditional site, states:
"This Migdol Eder was not the watchtower for the ordinary flocks which pastured on the barren sheep-ground beyond Bethlehem, but lay close to the town" (Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah 1:186).
He surveys (in Appendix VII) all the evidences he is aware of, and while he admits that 'absolute certainty' is impossible as to the exact date of the Nativity, he shows that the known 'factors do not really conflict with the December dating. "There is no adequate reason," he wrote, "for questioning the historical accuracy of this date. The objections generally made rest on grounds which seem to me historically untenable."
Readers of Scripture who possess first-hand knowledge, or have acquaintance with authoritative works on the climate of Palestine, recognize that the arguments against the December date, based upon wintry and snowy conditions, are untenable. The facts have long been known.
As far back as 1863, Smith's Bible Dictionary, under the heading 'Palestine: the Climate', explained the rarity of snow in southern Palestine, while it conceded its more frequent occurrence in the northern parts of the land. The mean temperature at Jerusalem during December is said to run around 47 to 60 degrees F.
It certainly would not hurt sheep to be out at night in that sort of temperature. The Dictionary further states:
"As in the time of our Saviour (Luke 12: 54), the rains come chiefly from the S. or S.W. They commence at the end of October or beginning of November, and continue with greater or less constancy till the end of February or middle of March, and occasionally, though rarely, to the end of April. It is not a heavy continuous rain, so much as a succession of severe showers or storms with intervening periods of fine bright weather, permitting the grain crops to grow and ripen. And although the season is not divided by any entire cessation of rain for a lengthened interval, as some represent, yet there appears to be a diminution in the fall for a few weeks in December and January, after which it begins again, and continues during February and till the conclusion of the season."
It may be noted that the traditional date .for the birth of Christ falls in this period of the diminution of rainfall toward the end of December. The former rains would have produced grass on the hills, and the fine bright weather intervening between the rains, with temperatures averaging 55 degrees F. would be excellent for sheep grazing on the hills east of David's royal city.