Tonight marks the eve of the 1675th Christmas celebration on the date the church finally decided that Jesus of Nazareth was born.
The early church fathers (after having put the mothers in their place temporally and spiritually) disputed whether the birth of the one they called savior should be commemorated at all. And then they disputed what date ought to be chosen since nobody had a clue. They dabbled around in May and April and November for more than a century. But nothing took hold until the Romans (under that sly dog Constantine) made Christianity official. Being the relentless organizers they were, the Romans squelched the dispute and organized Christmas for everybody on December 25. They held the first public celebration in 336. That is, the year we call 336. The Roman church fathers did not get around to organizing that part of the calendar for two more centuries, not just making it 336, but AD 336, supposedly being the number of years after the birth of Jesus, something even believers among today's scholars say is a miscalculation. But I digress.
The church fathers didn't just choose December 25, they commandeered it, absorbing and redirecting two other existing birth festivals celebrated on that date, the "Birth of the Unconquered Sun" and the birth of Mithras, the Persian "Sun of Righteousness," a favorite among Roman soldiers. Squeezing out the pagans was just getting revved up in those days. But soon, on the new festival of Christmas, those other Suns were forgotten in favor of the Son whose arrival had been announced, so they declared, by a star that had led three wise (and apparently affluent) Magi to his improvised crib.
Tonight, however, St. Nicholas and the Magi of marketing merge to squeeze out Jesus and let in Best Buy. That saint of the gifts has long since begun his travels through the skies to make his deliveries. As he is also the patron saint of Moscow, perhaps he spent a few extra minutes adding his bit to the massive protests against Vladimir Putin and popped down the chimney to glitterbomb the guy. I hope he brought his camera.
If you are waiting for St. Nick to deliver some packages down your chimney, these guys are keeping track.
Whether you worship Jesus, the Sun, your new flat screen the size of Delaware, something else or nothing at all, have a happy, merry, jolly Christmas Day. No matter how your relatives behave. If it gets too rough, or too lonely, you've got family here.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008:
The provocative Nobel laureate Harold Pinter died December 24. Although his work in the theater over the course of 32 plays was broadly praised, his political views drew savage attacks, including one from fellow Brit and neo-conservative Christopher Hitchens, who wrote in 2005 that giving the Swedish award "to someone who gave up literature for politics decades ago, and whose politics are primitive and hysterically anti-American and pro-dictatorial, is part of the almost complete degradation of the Nobel racket."
[Excerpt from Pinter's 2005 Nobel Acceptance speech]:
Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost. ...
Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed. ...
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