From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!menlo70!sytek!zehntel!tektronix!rich Newsgroups: net.followup Title: Re: One more thing on Christmas Article-I.D.: tektronix.877 Posted: Fri Jan 7 14:31:55 1983 Received: Sun Jan 9 02:51:14 1983 I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to this subject, until someone bothered to bring up `truth' instead of conjecture. The Bible says Christ was born in the lambing season (I'm not a fanatic, so I won't quote any chapters and verses). Even 2000 years ago, the lambing season, even in the middle east, is late winter to spring. That would put Christ's birth right around March, +-. Celebrating His birth was something which put early Christians in grave danger, so their best alternative was to celebrate His birth on a `major' Roman holiday, assuming the stupid Romans would know no difference. The closest major Roman holiday was the Winter Solstice, a week of festivities at the end of the month now known as December. Pick a date and we'll call it Christmas. I guess the whole point is mute now anyway. Christmas begins in this country at the end of October when the major department stores decide you WILL start buying things. Note that on December 26th, all the Valentine's decorations started going up. Commercialism tries hard to replace Christ with X. It should read, have a Merry $mas. One more question: How many of you knew that our sacred little Christmas Tree was a pagen symbol (used in Druid rites, among others)?