Saying they were scheduled on similar celestial events isn’t evidence that they derived from specific pagan celebrations though. Could be convergent evolution, not descent. No culture has a monopoly on the sky.

Never mind that Chavez has been dead for 13 years, or that no drug smugglers to the US operate out of Venezuela; he thinks he can be a big hero president by killing some bad guys, and so he’s chosen an easy nearby target.

Fox has been saying for years that Hugo Chavez is a bad guy, that Venezuela is a socialist country, that Latin America is poisoning American youth with drugs, and so in Trump logic “why don’t we just go in and kill ‘em?”

Similarly, there’s no period record of a Roman or Germanic festival that really resembles Easter, doubly since Easter already has a direct connection to the Jewish holiday of Passover.

For another thing, Christmas doesn’t always neatly align with Saturnalia. Saturnalia was from Dec. 19-23, while Christmas in many communities even now is Dec. 25-Jan. 6.

We can never *know* anything in history/archaeology, but there are a number of factors that make it unlikely.

Early Christianity defined itself in opposition to the Roman status quo, including polytheistic religion. Copying pagan rituals directly would have been anathema to them.

…as a parallel, there are few similarities between how Christmas is celebrated in Britain vs Spain vs Russia now.

That’s a pretty wild misunderstanding of what I’m saying.

Eventually some of the smaller rituals would be picked up by other communities and spread, however the celebration of the early predecessors to the extant Christian holidays were probably unrecognizable to what is practiced now…

For the first while they probably just practiced Jewish rituals and celebrations, and based on records there were lots of regional Christian celebrations that never spread to the broader community.

Nevertheless, there’s no evidence of a direct causal link between, say, Christmas and Saturnalia.

See, the thing is that basically all of the familiar Christmas traditions are first recorded hundreds of years after Christianity had driven all of the other religions in Europe to extinction.

They’re from the High Middle Ages or later, not the Roman era.

And it’s not like the haunted house movie genre ever went away either; they’re a lot cheaper to make than pirate movies.

I guess this means the IL-2 team are finally giving up on finding surviving period documentation of Pacific War Japanese planes.