nothing more than twigs plucked from the grove of the goddess Strenia, associated with Janus in the feast[830]; but in imperial times men gave honeyed things, that the year of the recipient might be full of sweetness, lamps that it might be full of light, copper and silver and gold that wealth might flow in amain[831]. Naturally, the Fathers were not slow to protest against these feasts, and, in particular, against the participation in them of professing Christians. Tertullian is, as usual, explicit and emphatic in his condemnation[832]. The position was aggravated when, probably in the fourth century, the Christian feast of the Birthday of Christ came to be fixed upon December 25, in the very heart of the pagan rejoicings and upon the actual day hitherto sacred to _Sol Invictus_. The origin of Christmas is wrapped in some obscurity[833]. The earliest notices of a celebration of the birth of Christ in the eastern Church attach it to that of his baptism on the Epiphany. This feast is as old as the second century. By the fourth it was widespread in the East, and was known also in Gaul and probably in northern Italy[834]. At Rome it cannot be traced so early; but it was generally adopted there by the beginning of the fifth, and Augustine blames the Donatists for rejecting it, and so cutting themselves off from fellowship with the East[835]. Christmas, on the other hand, made its appearance first at Rome, and the East only gradually and somewhat grudgingly accepted it. The Paulician Christians of Armenia to this day continue to feast the birth and the baptism together on January 6, and to regard the normal Christian practice as heretical. An exact date for the establishment of the Roman feast cannot be given, for the theory which ascribed it to Pope Liberius in 353 has been shown to be baseless[836]. But it appears from a document of 336 that the beginning of the liturgical year then already fell between December 8 and 27[837]. Christmas may, therefore, be assumed to have been in existence at least by 336.