I’m at home in Vermont today, where for the first time that I’ve been alive, there’s no snow! It’s a very green Christmas up here. The birds are chirping, the roof still dripping off some of the rain in recent days.
My dad and I were stacking wood yesterday and debating whether we should go for a celebratory Christmas kayak on the river. For years and years, we would clear off the river behind our house to go skating on Christmas Eve, gliding along on the frozen river beneath the stars and then coming in for our Christmas Eve readings. Last year, for the first time that we can remember, the river never even froze over through the winter. This year, it’s running fast and high with nary a block of ice in sight.
Tomorrow, a day late, should bring some relief. We’re supposed to get a storm that may bring up to a foot of snow.
Reading Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac this morning, here’s some Christmas history I found interesting:
No one knows exactly why the date of December 25th was chosen, but it was probably because December 25th was the date set for a Roman festival honoring the sun god Mithras. It also coincided with the pagan festival of Saturnalia, which was widely celebrated throughout the Roman Empire.
Unfortunately for the church, Saturnalia was usually celebrated with drunken revelry. And for Christians, for the next thousand years or so, Christmas became the wildest party of the year. There were huge feasts and street parties that often led to riots. It was writers who helped turn Christmas into more of a domestic holiday. The poem “The Night Before Christmas,” published in 1823, was one of the first works of literature to suggest that Christmas should be focused more on children than adults. And Charles Dickens’s novel A Christmas Carol, in 1843, helped popularize the idea that Christmas should be about family.
So there you have it — happy Christmas and Saturnalia to everyone!
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