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Post by faskew on Dec 21, 2018 9:57:24 GMT -5
The Straight Dope Digest has almost gone out of business. These days they’re just re-posting old items from years ago. This AM they had one from 2000 about Xmas that I found entertaining. Makes you yearn to return to the way things used to be. Hmmm. Considering that we have celebrations from Dec 24 to Jan 1, maybe things are still a lot like they used to be. 8-> ---------------------------------------------
“The celebration of Christmas evolved separately. Christmas initially was the result of a tradeoff with the pagan world Christians were trying to convert. They didn’t want to be seen as the bad guys by out and out banning the general rowdiness of post-harvest Saturnalia celebrations. So they compromised, letting the populace keep its celebrations as long as they were now done in honor of the birth of Christ. The drawback was that an air of pagan abandon carried over to the new holiday, and Christmas developed a bad reputation as a time of “misrule.”
“As late as the mid 1600’s, a Christmas ritual in Lincolnshire, England, featured the crowning of a “King of Misrule.” The Puritans, coming to America, wanted no part of this “unholiness” surrounding the birth of Christ. They had good reason to be concerned — demographic records show that the number of childbirths spiked dramatically in the month of September, exactly nine months after the Christmas celebrations.”
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