Thank you for engaging with the sources I was providing and not dismissing them outright. I was in the Christmas is pagan camp for a while and found the idea appealing because I dislike how Christianity homogenized everything and stomped out a bunch of unique cultures that we’ll likely never know about.

Then I started seeing some experts in the field trying to dispel the idea and I started to have doubts. Now I think Christmas was created independently and then it absorbed local customs as Christianity spread (that’s just my history enthusiast opinion though).