Event: Christmas Eve, December 24, around 238 A.D.??!!

[source cited at end]

Who?

Military outpost of the Roman Legion, the III Augusta.

Where?

Bu-Njem, North Africa.

Issue?

"What" or "Who" was being celebrated, "God" or "a god?" or ???!!!?

page 39 of Brian Campbell's War and Society in Imperial Rome 31 BC - AD 284. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

"The records of military bureacrats preserved on papyri or wooden tablets reveal the daily life of an enclosed community. For example, the record of a detachment of the legion III Augusta stationed at Bu-Njem in north Africa in the third century AD indicates that, of fifty-seven soldiers on 24 December, there were present one clerk, one orderly, one scout, eight cavalry; twenty-two were possibly on exercises, one man was on the watchtower, one at the gate, one at the commanding officer's, one possibly doing building work, three were sick, one was being flogged, seventeen had no specific task of whom fifteen were at the bake house (?) and two at the bath."

My own knee-jerk opinion is that the 15-man "working party" at the bake house just might have been assigned to help put together the mother of all December 25th parties, but! If so, I'd like to know for whom?