The colourful Christmas festival amusements, such as the pantomime, with its magical transformation scene and its transvestite roles and rich/poor reversals is a pagan survival of the fantastic Roman Saturnalia which had archetypal reasons for turning the world upside down. Similarly the colourful Carnival festivals derive from the Pagan spring festivals converted by the Christian church into the last celebrations of a feast of meat-eating before Lent, the last day of the carnival being Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras.

According to the Christian Church, white is the liturgical colour for Christmas and lasts until Epiphany, as laid down by Pope Innocent III in about 1200 AD and in the 13th Century Roman Missal (c. tit. xviii).

However, Father Christmas embodies vestiges of the folklore colours of the personification of aspects of nature, and he has sported many colours amongst the different nations, such as especially greens, whites and yellows. It was an American firm that did much towards establisihing Santa Claus' colours as red and white. Coca Cola based its concept of Father Christmas as a "jocund rubicund figure" on a poem by Clement C. Moore of 1823.

The white reindeer pulling accross the sky the red father-figure with a perpetually refilling sack of toys guarded by the black-faced man returns to the most ancient of colours attributed to the phases of the moon, as repeated in many different cultures: the new moon of the white god or goddess of birth and generation; the full moon or red god of passion or mutillation; and the black god of mystery, death, divination and rejuvination.

Central to the zodiacal idea of Christmas is the white goat or Capricorn (sometimes half a goat and a dolphin), which begins the winter solstice, the gateway to the gods in our old religion, a time when the death of nature was followed by a surge and flood of spiritual experience.