On Friday, 6 January CE 548,
the Jerusalem church celebrated Christmas for the last time on this date
as the Western church moved to celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ on December 25,

the grinch who stole the story of christmas

December 13, 2012 Hark! The Herald Angels Didn’t Sing T. M. LUHRMANN Professor of anthropology at Stanford University We are in Advent, but over the transom has come the sobering news that Image Books has just published a book written by the pope, “Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives,” in which he observes that there was neither an ox nor a donkey in the stable where Jesus was born. Nor did a host of angels sing. They spoke. He writes: “In the Gospel there is no reference to animals at this point. But prayerful reflection, reading Old and New Testaments in the light of one another, filled this lacuna at a very early state by pointing to Isaiah 1:3: ‘The ox knows its owner, and the ass its master’s crib, but Israel does not know.’ ” A few pages later, the pope explains that “Christianity has always understood that the speech of angels is actually song.

KRAMPUS He Sees You When You’re Sleeping and Gives You Nightmares MUNICH JOURNAL By MELISSA EDDY THE NEW YORK TIMES DEC. 21, 2014 Long before parents relied on the powers of Santa Claus to monitor their children’s behavior, their counterparts in Alpine villages called on a shaggy-furred, horned creature with a fistful of bound twigs to send the message that they had better watch out. Santa Claus and Satan's Cause "A wink of his eye, and a twist of his head, soon led me to know I had nothing to dread." Twas' the Night Before Christmas Clement C. Moore The fact is that Santa and Satan are alter egos, brothers; they have the same origin. On the surface, the two figures are polar opposites, but underneath they share the same parent, and both retain many of the old symbols associated with their "father" . . . From these two paths, he arrived at both the warmth of our fireplace and in the flames of hell.

THE TRUE STORY
December 25 was the birthday of the sun-god, Mithras, a deity whose religious influence was widespread in the Roman Empire, popular in the Roman military, during the first centuries of the present era. Mithras was identified with the Semitic sun-god Shamash, whose worship spread from Asia to the west where he was worshipped as Deus Sol Invictus (the invincible Sun) Mithras throughout the Roman Empire. He drives across the sky in a chariot of gold, the Sun being his eye.

Mithras was born in a cave from Petra, the sacred rock, who later became Peter, the foundation of the Christian Church. He is believed to be a Mediator between God and man, between the Sky and the Earth. It also became the belief of the early Christian world that Mithra was born of [a] Virgin. He traveled far and wide. He has twelve satellites, which are taken as the Sun's disciples. The Sun's great festivals are observed in the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox, i.e. Christmas and Easter.

There Goes the Sun
By RICHARD COHEN, OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Author of “Chasing the Sun:
The Epic Story of the Star That Gives Us Life”

December 20, 2010

WHAT is the winter solstice, and why bother to celebrate it, as so many people around the world will tomorrow? The word “solstice” derives from the Latin sol (meaning sun) and statum (stand still), and reflects what we see on the first days of summer and winter when, at dawn for two or three days, the sun seems to linger for several minutes in its passage across the sky, before beginning to double back.

Indeed, “turnings of the sun” is an old phrase, used by both Hesiod (> left) and Homer (> right). The novelist Alan Furst has one of his characters nicely observe, “the day the sun is said to pause. ... Pleasing, that idea. ... As though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down.”

Virtually all cultures have their own way of acknowledging this moment. The Welsh word for solstice [Byrddydd] translates as “the point of roughness” [when Rhiannon (left) gave birth to the sacred son, Pryderi] while the Talmud calls it “Tekufat Tevet,” first day of “the stripping time.” For the Chinese, winter’s beginning is “dongzhi,” (> left) when one tradition is making balls of glutinous rice, which symbolize family gathering. In Korea, these balls are mingled with a sweet red bean called pat jook (> right). According to local lore, each winter solstice a ghost comes to haunt villagers. The red bean in the rice balls repels him.

In parts of Scandinavia, the locals smear their front doors with butter so that Beiwe, sun goddess of fertility [and sanity] (left), can lap it up before she continues on her journey. (One wonders who does all the mopping up afterward.) Later, young women don candle-embedded helmets, while families go to bed having placed their shoes all in a row, to ensure peace over the coming year.

Street processions are another common feature. In Japan, young men known as “sun devils,” their faces daubed to represent their imagined solar ancestry, still go among the farms to ensure the earth’s fertility (and their own stocking-up with alcohol). In Ireland, people called wren-boys take to the roads, wearing masks or straw suits. The practice used to involve the killing of a wren, and singing songs while carrying the corpse from house to house.


wren

Sacrifice is a common thread. In areas of northern Pakistan, men have cold water poured over their heads in purification, and are forbidden to sit on any chair till the evening, when their heads will be sprinkled with goats’ blood. (Unhappy goats.) Purification is also the main object for the Zuni and Hopi tribes of North America, their attempt to recall the sun from its long winter slumber. It also marks the beginning of another turning of their “wheel of the year,” and kivas (sacred underground ritual chambers, right) are opened to mark the season.

Yet, for all these symbolisms, this time remains at heart an astronomical event, and quite a curious one. In summer, the sun is brighter and reaches higher into the sky, shortening the shadows that it casts; in winter it rises and sinks closer to the horizon, its light diffuses more and its shadows lengthen. As the winter hemisphere tilts steadily further away from the star, daylight becomes shorter and the sun arcs ever lower. Societies that were organized around agriculture intently studied the heavens, ensuring that the solstices were well charted.

Despite their best efforts, however, their priests and stargazers came to realize that it was exceptionally hard to pinpoint the moment of the sun’s turning by observation alone — even though they could define the successive seasons by the advancing and withdrawal of daylight and darkness.

The earth further complicates matters. Our globe tilts on its axis like a spinning top, going around the sun at an angle to its orbit of 23 and a half degrees. Yet the planet’s shape changes minutely and its axis wobbles, thus its orbit fluctuates. If its axis remained stable and if its orbit were a true circle, then the equinoxes and solstices would quarter the year into equal sections. As it is, the time between the spring and fall equinoxes in the Northern Hemisphere is slightly greater than that between fall and spring, the earth — being at that time closer to the sun — moving about 6 percent faster in January than in July.

The apparently supernatural power manifest in solstices to govern the seasons has been felt as far back as we know, inducing different reactions from different cultures — fertility rites, fire festivals, offerings to the gods. Many of the wintertime customs in Western Europe descend from the ancient Romans, who believed that their god of the harvest, Saturn, had ruled the land during an earlier age of abundance, and so celebrated the winter solstice with the Saturnalia, a feast of gift-giving, role-reversals (slaves berating their masters) and general public holiday from Dec. 17 to 24.

The transition from Roman paganism to Christianity, with its similar rites, took several centuries. With the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in the fourth century, customs were quickly appropriated and refashioned, as the sun and God’s son became inextricably entwined. Thus, although the New Testament gives no indication of Christ’s actual birthday (early writers preferring a spring date), in 354 Pope Liberius declared it to have befallen on Dec. 25.

The advantages of Christmas Day being celebrated then were obvious. As the Christian commentator Syrus wrote: “It was a custom of the pagans to celebrate on the same Dec. 25 the birthday of the sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity .... Accordingly, when the church authorities perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day.”

In Christendom, the Nativity gradually absorbed all other winter solstice rites, and the co-opting of solar imagery was part of the same process. Thus the solar discs that had once been depicted behind the heads of Asian rulers became the halos of Christian luminaries.

Egypt - Ra	Buddha	Buddha	Roman - Apollo	Christian

Despite the new religion’s apparent supremacy, many of the old customs survived — so much so that church elders worried that the veneration of Christ was being lost. In the fifth century, St. Augustine of Hippo and Pope Leo the Great felt compelled to remind their flocks that Christ, not the sun, was their proper object of their worship.

While Roman Christianity was the dominant culture in Western Europe, it was by no means the only one. By millennium’s end, the Danes controlled most of England, bringing with them “Yule,” their name for winter solstice celebrations, probably derived from an earlier term for “wheel.” For centuries, the most sacred Norse symbol had been the wheel of the heavens, represented by a six- or eight-spoked wheel or by a cross within a wheel signifying solar rays [the symbol adopted by Opus Dei, (right)].

The Norse peoples, many of whom settled in what is now Yorkshire, would construct huge solar wheels and place them next to hilltop bonfires, while in the Middle Ages processions bore wheels upon chariots or boats. In other parts of Europe, where the Vikings were feared and hated, a taboo on using spinning wheels during solstices lasted well into the 20th century. The spinning-wheel on which Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger may exemplify this sense of menace.

Throughout much of Europe, at least up until the 16th century, starvation was common from January to April, a period known as “the famine months.” Most cattle were slaughtered so they would not have to be fed over the winter, making the solstice almost the only time of year that fresh meat was readily available. The boar’s head at Christmas feasts represents the dying sun of the old year, while the suckling pig — with the apple of immortality in its mouth — the new.

The turning of the sun was perhaps even more important in the New World than the Old. The Aztecs, who believed that the heart harbored elements of the sun’s power, ensured its continual well-being by tearing out this vital organ from hunchbacks, dwarves or prisoners of war, so releasing the “divine sun fragments” entrapped by the body and its desires.

The Incas would celebrate the solar festival of Inti Raymi by having their priests attempt to tie down the celestial body. At Machu Pichu, high in the Peruvian Andes, there is a large stone column called the Intihuatana, (“hitching post of the sun,”) to which the star would be symbolically harnessed. It is unclear how the Incas measured the success of this endeavor, but at least the sun returned the following day.

Yet above all other rituals, reproducing the sun’s fire by kindling flame on earth is the commonest solstice practice, both at midsummer and midwinter. Thomas Hardy, describing Dorset villagers around a bonfire in “The Return of the Native,” offers an explanation for such a worldwide phenomenon:

“To light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of men when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against the fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, ‘Let there be light.’ ”

So there is good reason to celebrate the winter solstice — but maybe that celebration is still touched with a little fear.

RICHARD COHEN

Click √ on cover to order

Celestial Holidays
EDITORIAL
The New York Times: December 21, 2010

This is it, the shortest day of the year, the longest night. Winter, which begins Tuesday at 6:38 p.m. Eastern time, will get no darker than this. Slowly, inexorably, the days will begin to yawn wider and wider, and night will begin to contract. The change is just a few seconds at first — New Year’s Eve in Manhattan will be only 28 seconds longer than Christmas Eve. By mid-March, the days will be growing by some 2 minutes and 40 seconds apiece, and then the rate of change slows again until late June.

We come to the winter solstice with mixed feelings. It will be lovely to have more light in the day. But there’s something equally wonderful about these long hibernal nights. By 4:30 every day — just as the sun is disappearing — we start to feel a little ursine, ready to dig a hole and sleep away the winter. How different our species would be if only we’d learned that one great trick!

We are all deeply habituated, in this northern clime, to the annual accordioning of the day — so much so that an equatorial place like Quito, Ecuador, where the length of day changes only by a second from solstice to solstice, sounds almost like a city out of science fiction. In some ways, that daily constancy seems more disorienting here, where the length of day changes by almost six hours, than the reversal of seasons in the Southern Hemisphere, where Christmas comes in summer.

Another important astronomical holiday follows soon after the winter solstice (which included a lunar eclipse). At 2 p.m., New York time, on Jan. 3, the Earth reaches Perihelion — the closest approach to the Sun in our elliptical orbit, a little more than 91 million miles away.

For some reason, this is a moment that goes uncelebrated, entirely unheralded. So we say to you all,

Merry Solstice and have a Happy Perihelion!

A FELICITOUS FESTIVUS TO ALL!

“Attack the myth that Christianity owns the Solstice season.”

~ DAVID SILVERMAN
President of American Atheists

EXPOSE YOURSELF

TO THE TRUTH!