Well, I suspect that somewhere in that timeline, the Christians accepted the new version of the holiday *as* a religious holiday before it eventually became secularized and they accepted that secularized version as well.
As far as that goes, would it really be accurate to say that (modern) Christians accept the "new" version of Christmas (that celebrated on Dec. 25th) as a *non*-religious holiday? It seems much more likely to me that to true Christians, it retains all the religious significance it ever had -- even if they celebrate it in modern fashion with the tree, lights, gifts, commercialism, etc.
A simpler (and therefore more likely) explanation is that if they know this at all, they simply don't think it's relevant. Why should they care what people of an earlier era felt about it? I don't see that modern Christians are somehow obligated to follow suit, just for the sake of obsessive, misguided historical consistency.
The emphasis I discern from Christians isn't to make Christmas *only* about Christ, but that the holiday's religious significance should be borne in mind. To "keep Christ in Christmas," to quote an old bumper sticker.
Geoff
-- "I'm so anal that I weigh each of my cd's to the nearest microgram, fifty times, on a quartz crystal microbalance and then arrange them by standard deviation. Chicks dig that." -- Michael H. Alaimo
