Usefully Useless

Isn’t that some pagan thing those new-age folks make a bunch of noise about?

Well, no. It’s not. There are two meanings to it, one civil, one astronomical. I’ll do the astronomical one first. The summer solstice is simply when the sun reaches its highest in the sky, the tilt of Earth’s axis pointing directly to the sun. For this year, that time will be 05:45 UTC, June 21st. It’s the year’s longest day and, in places where the seasons aren’t lagged by seas or oceans, represents the height of summer. Of course here in Britain, the seasons are lagged by the Atlantic Ocean and we get the height of summer about a month later.

The sun will rise in the north east and set in the north west. Overnight it will never get truly dark, the northern horizon will glow as though the early stages of dawn constantly all night long because the sun just isn’t far enough below the horizon.

In civil use, it’s Fathers’ Day. It’s absolutely no coincidence that this is the longest day of the year! Fathers’ Day is held on the third Sunday in June, this being a much later Christian addition (early 20th century Unted States) which held that festivals could only be held on Sundays. This is merely the modern adaptation of the numerous summer solstice celebrations.

Not too coincidentally, Mothers’ Day, the third Sunday in some peculiar Christian festival called Lent, is almost on the Vernal Equinox and before the Christians ruined it, it was on the Vernal Equinox.

So if we start at the first equinox and run through the solstices, we have Mothers’ Day on the Vernal Equinox, Fathers’ Day on the Summer Solstice, various Harvest Festivals on the Autumnal Equinox and finally Christmas on the Winter Solstice.

Or you can just think of it as some pagan thing, that’s good too.

Santa doesn’t feature in any holy texts, be they Christian or otherwise, so why’s he so associated with Christmas? The “real” Santa was a Myran bishop who was imprisoned in around 300AD by Emperor Diocletian and freed by Constantine. A minor cult grew around him and began worshipping him. The most common legend was that a poor man could not afford dowries to sell off his three daughters into marriage but this bishop tossed three bags of money through an open window which landed in stockings which were drying by the fire. Alternatively, the money was enclosed in wet stockings.

A tradition of Saint Nicholas secretly giving children (yes, the old man’s daughters were children of around 8-13 years old) gifts on his feast day, 6th of December.

The next step in making the modern Santa was after New Amsterdam was annexed by the Americans and renamed to New York. Dutch settlers published a satire of the old and forgotten feast of Saint Nicholas in 1809. St. Nick was portrayed as a fat jovial guy with a large beard, a big clay pipe and is dressed in fur. His appearance was likely taken from the British “Father Christmas” who came from legends of Odin. This one, however, slid down chimneys.

He wasn’t to develop more for another 14 years when a New York newspaper published an anonymous poem called “The Night Before Christmas”, now a literary classic. The author has been discovered as Clement Clarke Moore (a professor of classical literature) who likely didn’t want his reputation judged by something he wrote to amuse children. In this, St. Nick arrived on a sleigh pulled by eight minature reindeer. This was necessary because of the Little Ice Age which caused New York (and European) weather to be very harsh over the winter and so almost always snowy. All the reindeer were named, but not a single one was Rudolph.

Santa’s trademark red and white outfit came in 1893 when cartoonist Thomas Nast drew some panels based on “The Night Before Christmas”. It wasn’t yet red, but the outfit was still fur (where the actual fur is turned inwards for insulation and only comes out at edges). In 1869 the fur became the white of a polar bear but with the hide side dyed red. Santa’s modern image was made.

He wasn’t seen in the red outfit very often until 1931 when Coca Cola corporation began using his red and white outfit in their Christmas advertising. They ran it every Christmas for 35 years, the last being in 1966. It was also Coca Cola who changed Santa’s reindeer from being minatures to being full sized deer.

A new twist to this was put in Britain which had long had “Old Father Christmas” or just “Father Christmas” (who in turn descends from Viking tales of Odin). He was a jolly red-nosed heavy drinker who embodied the cheer, joy and merriment of Christmas and was likely a response to Britain’s kicking out of the Puritans (who went to the US and founded most of its legal code and began the disastrous Temperance movement). The foreign Santa Claus then was merged with Father Christmas as the personification of the holidays. Today both names are still commonly used throughout Britain.

Rudolph arrived in 1939 when an advertisement featured him as a cartoon character to sell some product or other.

It’s a long way from the poor old man who was ‘charitably’ aided by a Christian saint to sell his child daughters into marriage.

People should really stop trying to apply reality where reality shouldn’t be applied. It’s Christmas after all and numerous kooks are trying to find some astronomical explanation for the star of Bethlehem as told in the Nativity story.

There is none. There can be none. The story doesn’t even make sense.

As told in the Bible, and I’ll quote “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.”

They saw a star in the east, but they are from the east, so they went east. If you’re to the east of Jerusalem and you walk east, you go away from Jerusalem. A star in the east would have led the three astrologers to the east, which would take them away from Jerusalem. So what are they doing there?

It’s self contradictory, it doesn’t make sense and trying to apply reality to fiction will result in failure.

The King James Bible, from which I took that quote, is translated from Greek, which was in turn translated from Hebrew. The Greek word used is “aster” which literally means “star” but not as we consider a star. Aster could have described the moon, a planet, a comet or a star. Simply put, “aster” was anything in the sky at night. The Greeks knew about comets and had a specific term for them. Also they named the planets and the Moon. The Arabs also did, and were the time’s most prolific and accurate astronomers; Most stars have Arabic names as testament to their meticulous cataloging. The Greeks were also somewhat interested in “new stars”, as they called transient phenomena that weren’t comets. We also have the Chinese who were notorious for recording any celestial phenomenon, they have records of Comet Halley well into antiquity, three supernovae, several novae and records of other comets so accurate that orbits can be determined from them. The ancients were certainly interested in what went on over their heads, they didn’t know what they were as we do, but they sure recorded them. Where are those records for this particular star?

The Arabs and Chinese had nothing to say about some magnificent star suddenly appearing. Yes, the Arabs, who the Hebrews were did not record anything out of the ordinary. The American natives make no record. The Chinese don’t. Neither do the Indians or the Japanese or the Europeans… The likelyhood of a bright star that had no right to be there being missed by everyone on Earth except three astrologers is somewhat remote.

An additional problem is that stars and indeed anything else in the night sky will move over the course of a night. A star in the east at sunset would be in the south at midnight and in the west at sunrise. Following it would lead one in a circle.

If you’re a religious type, you shouldn’t need an explanation. If you’re not, why would you be trying to explain a fictitious account anyway? Exactly who are these people pandering to?