🚀 go-pugleaf

Brissie <brissie@zwallet.com> wrote in 
news:8h94s05r7op3663jtptib30nd3gobsrui1@4ax.com:
 
>>Have a Happy and safe Xmas NC & AC
> 
> I'm not one of them but apparently some people get offended using
> Xmas, becuase the X crosses out the christ from christmas and
> christmas is all about the christ.

CHRISTMAS: The condensed version.

Christmas is the christian celebration of the birth of their saviour, 
Jesus Christ. The festival was adopted from earlier pagan winter 
solstice celebrations celebrating the sun, including the Roman festival 
of Saturnalia celebrated from December the 17th to the 24th; Celtic 
Yuletide which was a twelve-day long festival of feasting around 
November/December; the Roman New Year celebrated on January the first 
when lights and greenery were used to decorate houses in celebration of 
the birth of the undying sun, and presents were given to children and 
the poor.

Other elements of modern christmas celebrations are also adopted from 
earlier pagan celebrations: the christmas tree as a fir tree originates 
with the Oak tree that was sacred to Odin in Norse and Germanic 
tradition, and which was replaced by the fir tree declared to be sacred 
to Jesus by St Boniface in Germany in the 8th century. Mistletoe and 
holly were sacred to the Druids who used them as decorations in their 
winter solstice celebrations to the sun around mid-December.

Christmas was first celebrated around the 2nd century on two dates 
depending upon church; the Roman catholic church adopting December the 
25th and some other churches adopting January the 6th which around the 
5th century became Epiphany.

The Puritans supressed christmas celebrations in Britain and America on 
the justifiable grounds of their pagan origins, however since the 18th 
century when the first christmas cards were produced by the company of 
Goodall of London in 1862, peoples of many cultures, including Jews 
have celebrated christmas in a variety of religious, pagan and other 
ways, with today the Jehova's Witnesses being the only major christian 
objectors to the celebration.

Complaints about the commercialisation of christmas are not new. In the 
19th century Charles Dicken's character 'Ebeneazer Scrooge' in the 
novel 'A Christmas Carol' complains that christmas is a 'humbug' or in 
other words a con or a rip off. 

<http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com/cgi-bin/xphrase.pl?keyword=christ>

IOW: The NAME for what is generally a good piss-up and pig-out and 
exchange of gifts may have been derived from a Christian festival. But 
Christians don't own it and certainly didn't invent it. Why? Because 
the pissing-up and pigging-out and giving of gifts at this time of year 
has been going on since some farmer discovered home-brewing, thousands 
of years before JC was a gleam in his daddy's eye.

X marks the spot.

-- 
dee