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Post by Galadriel on Dec 15, 2006 20:44:48 GMT
@ Shan Did you know that the original Santa was in fact Father Time, dressed in red clothes with the white edges? Check this out --->Yule<---- Enjoy
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Post by cleglaw on Dec 15, 2006 21:40:41 GMT
@ Shan Did you know that the original Santa was in fact Father Time, dressed in red clothes with the white edges? Check this out --->Yule<---- Enjoy Hiya. I thought that you would like to know that McAfee SiteAdvisor has the following has flagged the about the Geocities site you linked to and has these remarks to say: McAfee SiteAdvisor is a security add on I run to help keep me from going where I oughtn't on the net. I hope you don't mind me telling you the site being flagged.
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Post by Shan on Dec 16, 2006 4:59:27 GMT
Very useful info, Cleg. Thanks for the warning. I for one appreciate it very much.
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Post by Shan on Dec 16, 2006 5:23:39 GMT
The person I was thinking of is called Jenny Nyström, and she was a painter and illustrator. She created the modern picture of Jultomten through the painting of around 3000 postcards and 2500 book illustrations. More info can be found here. Übereil I love the picture, Ube. She does/did fantastic work. I've seen some of her work before, but I had no idea who she was. Her little elf gnomes are sooooooooo cute. I think I am going to see if I can find some more of them and post a few others. If you have any others that you would like to post, do it.
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Post by Shan on Dec 16, 2006 5:25:05 GMT
Yay!!! Elliot and YouTube came through for us. Thanks Elliot. The song was cute.
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Post by Elliot Kane on Dec 16, 2006 5:44:43 GMT
Never known another singer with such utter vibrancy. Everything Skye sings just echoes with 'life is great! Get up and dance!' I love that
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Misty
Apprentice
Posts: 156
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Post by Misty on Dec 16, 2006 8:05:02 GMT
When you talk about Santa Claus you can't leave out Santa Claws! Or his reindeer Puddles! If you a bad lil girl or boy and Santa Claws visits your house you get a swat on the nose and a puddle by the tree. But if you are good you might find a dead mouse in your socking! I guess it's a kind of a damned if you do and damn if you don't kind of situations.
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Post by Ubereil on Dec 16, 2006 9:30:32 GMT
I love the picture, Ube. She does/did fantastic work. I've seen some of her work before, but I had no idea who she was. Her little elf gnomes are sooooooooo cute. I think I am going to see if I can find some more of them and post a few others. If you have any others that you would like to post, do it. I tried to find more pictures (useing Google), but found suprizeinglly few ... Besides, I see I forgot to include the second picture. I thought I'd post three or five when I started the post, but I only found one good, and one decent... Feel free to post more if you find though . Übereil
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Post by cleglaw on Dec 16, 2006 13:10:11 GMT
My new Avatar is an actual photo of the baby Jesus taken shortly after his birth.
I acquired it from a photographer who takes middle eastern and Iraqi photos for Reuters and AP -- so I know it is legitimate. Besides it looks just like Jesus.
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Post by Galadriel on Dec 16, 2006 18:19:06 GMT
@ Shan Did you know that the original Santa was in fact Father Time, dressed in red clothes with the white edges? Check this out --->Yule<---- Enjoy Hiya. I thought that you would like to know that McAfee SiteAdvisor has the following has flagged the about the Geocities site you linked to and has these remarks to say: McAfee SiteAdvisor is a security add on I run to help keep me from going where I oughtn't on the net. I hope you don't mind me telling you the site being flagged. Hey Cleg, thanks for letting me know about this. I will copy/paste the info on Father Time, like we wiccans call him. Yule or winter solstice happens near December 21, which is the longest darkest night of the year. The dark of Winter is safe like my bedcovers at night. Dark whispers of a Mother's love caress me. In the darkness of the Mother's womb, the void I am safe, sustained, at peace. and can move inward, into my own dark self, looking, learning, purifying. I can cleanse myself of all that blocks me from being born new with the rising new solstice sun when the sun king is born, with promises for the Spring ahead.
Our Christian friends are often quite surprised at how enthusiastically we Pagans celebrate the 'Christmas' season. Even though we prefer to use the word 'Yule', and our celebrations may peak a few days BEFORE the 25th, we nonetheless follow many of the traditional customs of the season: decorated trees, carolling, presents, Yule logs, and mistletoe. We might even go so far as putting up a 'Nativity set', though for us the three central characters are likely to be interpreted as Mother Nature,Father Time, and the Baby Sun-God. None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who knows the true history of the holiday, of course.
In fact, if truth be known, the holiday of Christmas has always been more Pagan than Christian, with it's associations of Nordic divination, Celtic fertility rites, and Roman Mithraism. That is why both Martin Luther and John Calvin abhorred it, why the Puritans refused to acknowledge it, much less celebrate it (to them, no day of the year could be more holy than the Sabbath), and why it was even made ILLEGAL in Boston! The holiday was already too closely associated with the birth of older Pagan gods and heroes. And many
of them (like Oedipus, Theseus, Hercules, Perseus, Jason, Dionysus, Apollo, Mithra, Horus and even Arthur) possessed a narrative of birth, death, and resurrection that was uncomfortably close to that of Jesus. And to make matters worse, many of them pre-dated the Christian Savior.
Ultimately, of course, the holiday is rooted deeply in the cycle of the year. It is the Winter Solstice that is being celebrated, seed-time of the year, the longest night and shortest day. It is the birthday of the new Sun King, the Son of God -- by whatever name you choose to call him. On this darkest of nights, the Goddess becomes the Great Mother and once again gives birth. And it makes perfect poetic sense that on the longest night of the winter, 'the dark night of our souls', there springs the new spark of hope, the Sacred Fire,the Light of the World, the Coel Coeth.
That is why Pagans have as much right to claim this holiday as Christians. Perhaps even more so, as the Christians were rather late in laying claim to it, and tried more than once to reject it. There had been a tradition in the West that Mary bore the child Jesus on the twenty-fifth day, but no one could seem to decide on the month. Finally, in 320 C.E., the Catholic Fathers in Rome decided to make it December, in an effort to co-opt the Mithraic celebration of the Romans and the Yule celebrations of the Celts and Saxons.
There was never much pretense that the date they finally chose was historically accurate. Shepherds just don't 'tend their flocks by night' in the high pastures in the dead of winter! But if one wishes to use the New Testament as historical evidence, this reference may
point to sometime in the spring as the time of Jesus's birth. This is because the lambing season occurs in the spring and that is the only time when shepherds are likely to 'watch their flocks by night' -- to make sure the lambing goes well. Knowing this, the Eastern half of the Church continued to reject December 25, preferring a 'movable date' fixed by their astrologers according to the moon.
Thus, despite its shaky start (for over three centuries, no one knew when Jesus was supposed to have been born!), December 25 finally began to catch on. By 529, it was a civic holiday, and all work or public business (except that of cooks, bakers, or any that contributed to the delight of the holiday) was prohibited by the Emperor Justinian. In 563, the Council of Braga forbade fasting on Christmas Day, and four years later the Council of Tours proclaimed the twelve days from December 25 to Epiphany as a sacred, festive season. This last point is perhaps the hardest to impress upon the modern reader, who is lucky to get a single day off work. Christmas, in the Middle Ages, was not a SINGLE day, but rather a period of TWELVE days, from December 25 to January 6. The Twelve Days of Christmas, in fact. It is certainly lamentable that the modern world has abandoned this approach, along with the popular Twelfth Night celebrations.
Of course, the Christian version of the holiday spread to many countries no faster than Christianity itself, which means that 'Christmas' wasn't celebrated in Ireland until the late fifth century; in England, Switzerland, and Austria until the seventh; in Germany until the eighth; and in the Slavic lands until the ninth and tenth. Not that these countries lacked their own mid-winter celebrations of Yuletide. Long before the world had heard of Jesus, Pagans had been observing the season by bringing in the Yule log, wishing on it, and lighting it from the remains of last year's log. Riddles were posed and answered, magic and rituals were practiced, wild boars were sacrificed and consumed along with large quantities of liquor, corn dollies were carried from house to house while carolling, fertility rites were practiced (girls standing under a sprig of mistletoe were subject to a bit more than a kiss), and divinations were cast for the coming Spring. Many of these Pagan customs, in an appropriately watered-down form, have entered the mainstream of Christian celebration, though most celebrants do not realize (or do not mention it, if they do) their origins.
For modern Witches, Yule (from the Anglo-Saxon 'Yula', meaning 'wheel' of the year) is usually celebrated on the actual Winter Solstice, which may vary by a few days, though it usually occurs on or around December 21st. It is a Lesser Sabbat or Lower Holiday in the modern Pagan calendar, one of the four quarter-days of the year, but a very important one. This year (1997) it occurs on December 21st 12:08 PM PST. Pagan customs are still enthusiastically followed. Once, the Yule log had been the center of the celebration. It was lighted on the eve of the solstice (it should light on the first try) and must be kept burning for twelve hours, for good luck. It should be made of ash. Later, the Yule log was replaced by the Yule tree but, instead of burning it, burning candles were placed on it. In Christianity, Protestants might claim that Martin Luther invented the custom, and Catholics might grant St. Boniface the honor, but the custom can demonstrably be traced back through the Roman Saturnalia all the way to ancient Egypt. Needless to say, such a tree should be cut down rather than purchased, and should be disposed of by burning, the proper way to dispatch any sacred object.
Along with the evergreen, the holly and the ivy and the mistletoe were important plants of the season, all symbolizing fertility and everlasting life. Mistletoe was especially venerated by the Celtic Druids, who cut it with a golden sickle on the sixth night of the moon, and believed it to be an aphrodisiac. (Magically -- not medicinally! It's highly toxic!) But aphrodisiacs must have been the smallest part of the Yuletide menu in ancient times, as contemporary reports indicate that the tables fairly creaked under the strain of every type of good food. And drink! The most popular of which was the 'wassail cup' deriving its name from the Anglo-Saxon term 'waes hael' (be whole or hale).
Medieval Christmas folklore seems endless: that animals will all kneel down as the Holy Night arrives, that bees hum the '100th psalm' on Christmas Eve, that a windy Christmas will bring good luck, that a person born on Christmas Day can see the Little People, that a cricket on the hearth brings good luck, that if one opens all the doors of the house at midnight all the evil spirits will depart, that you will have one lucky month for each Christmas pudding you sample, that the tree must be taken down by Twelfth Night or bad luck is sure to follow, that 'if Christmas on a Sunday be, a windy winter we shall see', that 'hours of sun on Christmas Day, so many frosts in the month of May', that one can use the Twelve Days of Christmas to predict the weather for each of the twelve months of the coming year, and so on.
Remembering that most Christmas customs are ultimately based upon older Pagan customs, it only remains for modern Pagans to reclaim their lost traditions. In doing so, we can share many common customs with our Christian friends, albeit with a slightly different interpretation. And thus we all share in the beauty of this most magical of seasons, when the Mother Goddess once again gives birth to the baby Sun-God and sets the wheel in motion again. To conclude with a long-overdue paraphrase, 'Goddess bless us, every one!'
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Post by Elliot Kane on Dec 16, 2006 20:26:22 GMT
How did I ever forget: Fairytale of New York by The Pogues and Kirsty McColl. Definitely my favourite Christmas song, for many reasons
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Post by Shan on Dec 21, 2006 1:51:51 GMT
Hey, Ky, thanks for copying and pasting the the Father Time story over. I had never read it. I found it very interesting though. Makes a great addition to the thread.
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Post by Shan on Dec 21, 2006 1:53:27 GMT
Misty, you're great at finding kitty and doggie pics. Those are really cute. If you know of any other, I would love to see them.
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Post by Shan on Dec 21, 2006 1:56:21 GMT
I haven't had much of a chance to look for more pics yet, but I would like to see if I can find any. She is well known for her gnome pictures, and I may see if I can find some of them to post in the art thread later. I think that would be cool since the gnome ones were the ones that introduced me to her work.
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Post by Shan on Dec 21, 2006 1:58:25 GMT
My new Avatar is an actual photo of the baby Jesus taken shortly after his birth. I acquired it from a photographer who takes middle eastern and Iraqi photos for Reuters and AP -- so I know it is legitimate. Besides it looks just like Jesus. Cute avatar Cleg. Love the expression. Uh, could you provide the name of the photographer. Maybe some of us would like to see if he has any more pictures of baby Jesus since he provides legit pics.
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Post by Shan on Dec 21, 2006 2:00:24 GMT
How did I ever forget: Fairytale of New York by The Pogues and Kirsty McColl. Definitely my favourite Christmas song, for many reasons And you almost forgot to share your favorite Christmas song with me, Elliot. I just can't believe you would do such a thing. ;D Uh, can you tell me a few of the reasons as to why it is your favorite?
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Post by Shan on Dec 21, 2006 2:07:51 GMT
The girls and I found these on the net and they want to try making one. Looks pretty easy to make too. The children cut their own shapes for the hats and the features. The beards are made of copy paper. Start with a circle of paper and start cutting smaller and smaller circles to make the curly beard. The curled paper can also be put on the back of the figure if you would like.
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Post by Shan on Dec 21, 2006 2:28:57 GMT
And here are some Folk Art Santas
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Post by Shan on Dec 21, 2006 2:32:09 GMT
Father Christmas, Saint Nick, Santa Clause. These are just a few of the names that this jolly old elf goes by!
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Post by Shan on Dec 21, 2006 2:34:54 GMT
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