Happy… uh… Holidays. Merry… um… Saturnalia. Have a joyous… er… Winter Solstice.
Let’s celebrate… Yule. That’s it: Yule!
Let’s cut down the sacred spruce and hang candles on its boughs, representing the stars pivoting around Yggdrasil, the axle-tree of the cosmos!
Let’s participate in the ritual slaughter of the Corn God, and thereby destroy the old year to make way for the new!
Join us at the Year’s Midnight as we cut the mistletoe from the oak with a golden sickle and then lower the Sperm of the Gods onto a silken sheet, recapitulating the death of Balder at the hands of Loki, and thus the birth of the new year!
Shout for joy as the Priestess of the Moon raises her silver blade!
But whatever you do, don’t mention the name of Jesus Christ…
Jesus…Christ? Pray tell, who was He?
Was a beautiful summers day today, ate lunch by the sea, opened presents on the deck, going to have a BBQ tomorrow and maybe watch some cricket.
Got to say find your Yuletide wishes totally inappropriate.
Merry Christmas to you.
And Happy Solstice Season to you, unaha-closp, in your lovely bubble where the word “Christmas” is not a problematic one.
May you continue to thrive there.
Happy New Year, too…that greeting is safe.
Lots of “lovely bubbles”, red wines and beer and port – I am filled with the Spirits. All partaken in the company of family, rather pleasently. You have all this to look forward to, I wish you all the best.
It may have been a co-opted mid-winter celebration that got it started. But it is now (or it was until an hour ago) Christmas Day. It is Christmas everywhere and only winter in half the world, it is the middle of summer here and it is Christmas. So please accept the wishes of a very Merry Christmas.
PS – If you truly want Yuletide greetings you’ll have to wait about six months.
PPS – Hope you have a white Christmas.
Merry Christmas all. There! I said the C-word? Has anybody else noticed that people have been saying it more this year?
To our Europeans: Joyeux Noel….Froeliche Weihnachten….sorry I’ve run out of languages.
Merry Christmas to both of you.
The odd thing that saying or not saying “Merry Christmas” is making a statement when it used to be an unproblematic festive greeting. Soon we’ll even have to wonder what people mean when they say “God bless you” after every sneeze. The Spanish have a greater problem with “Adios” which is a contraction of “A Dios” which I assume means “To God.”
And Happy New Years … you’re not Chinese are you?
Something traditional:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=EkMjYNAKlHw
chsw10605
Merry Christmas. I think, with due respect to the folks who think this post was inappropriate, that it was extremely appropriate. I’m almost sick to my stomach from the fact that its almost impossible to hear it in Canada these days.
In fact, I was watching “Its a Wonderful Life” with my 10 year old daughter last night on CBC TV(the state propaganda organ) and during the commercials I was treated to a pre-mercial of a show starting in January. Get this:
“Little Mosque on the Prairie”
I kid you not. Of all the ethnic minorities in Canada, including a huge Chinese population and Sikh population, who gets their own TV show? Islam? WTF? Apparently all it takes to get the state to pay for a show is to let off a few bombs so the state can run around trying to convince everyone that you DON’T let off bombs.
Its time the US occupied Canada so we can be run by non-insanity. Even if its just for a week or so…just to get a taste of normalcy.
HAPPY CHRISTMAS, Baron and Dymphna
I came across this on VFR.
How Christianity solved the problem of monotheism
Shrewsbury writes:
Perhaps the central problem of any monotheism is that it puts the believer, who is of course a creature, in the role of hostage, of desperate placater of the all-powerful creator—resulting in a sort of cosmic Stockholm syndrome. Christianity’s genius is that God Himself, as Christ, has become the hostage, freeing all His creation. This is so perfect and beautiful as to be worthy indeed of the word divine.
Shrewsbury is not a believing Christian, but he believes that Christianity is thus demonstrably the highest of religions, and that any intellectually honest monotheist (or atheist, for that matter) is obliged to agree with him. Only Christianity frees the creature from his terror and permits him the free will to accept God’s gift.
(Thus Mahomet assumes the guise, not biblically perhaps, but literally, of an anti-Christ, returning monotheism to its former state, with power rather than goodness as defining theme—and adding for bad measure more than a dollop of Arabian cruelty. Islam is thus not only demonstrably inferior to Christianity, but, since it came later, a ghastly perversion of it, even as orcs bred from elves by Sauron.)
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/006972.html
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If you find the above, a truly remarkable insight, then follow it up in the link.
I believe that I, as a Jew, have permission to say “it”: Merry Christmas to Dymphna, the Baron, and all the readers of GoV.
It is possibly belated, Andre, but cHannukah haTob!
And Merry Christmas to all. (But Day 2 of Christmas)
Barron
Yes I had a merry Christmas.
I hope your Christmas (and/or holiday of choice) was truly merry..
At the risk of ruining the Gates reputation for slavish political correctness, I will say the name; at Christmas we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ
And a happy new year.