A Rant About Christmas

But first, a disclaimer. As a general rule, I love christmas. I've had my depressing festive periods in the past, as has everyone, but usually it rocks, especially last year.
Second Disclaimer, I am not prejudice against any form of religious denomination........But I am getting sick to death of christians at christmas!

Let me explain with some detail about the crux of my argument. Firstly, I am not debating the validity of the hypothesis that a child called, or later known as, Jesus, was born. Whether or not he was the offspring (and yet simultaneously the same entity as) and arbitrary deity is a discussion for another day. But Jesus WAS NOT BORN IN DECEMBER!!!! He was not born in winter, he was born in spring/summer. Common sense would dictate that two thousand years ago, a child born in the winter in the middle east would probably die. Christmas would have originally been celebrated in the middle of the year. But why, you may ask, do we celebrate it in December, on the 25th? Well, it was because the christians decided to do something very sneaky, they decided to cash in on a much more popular PAGAN festival, one known as Yule (and many other names)

Yule falls on the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, which by the Gregorian Calender, is the 21st of December. Some traditions of Yule included:

• Bringing an evergreen tree into the home so that the life it has through the cold winter months may be passed onto to the household
• Decorating the tree so that the tree nymphs won't be upset for being disturbed.
• Placing candles on the tree to keep said nymphs warm
• Stringing up mistletoe and ivy in honour of the Horned God (the male aspect of the bi-gendered god/goddess, NOT THE DEVIL). The Horned God rules over autumn/winter, then dies and is reborn as the Goddess for spring/summer.
• Honouring the image of the Robin as a messenger of the Horned God
• Taking the last log from the fire and keeping it for next year so there will always be fire wood, a 'Yule Log' you might say.

These all sound mighty familiar don't they? That's because 99% of 'Christ'mas is taken from Yule. I am not for one second arguing for a paganisation or secularisation of xmas, I don't mind christians thinking it's all their idea. What I do mind though is people making christmas ALL ABOUT CHRISTIANITY. I was in the bullring, watching some bangra dancers performing for a children's charity. They weren't doing it for christmas, they were taking advantage of the christmas shopping. But I heard one bigot say "Christmas is about Christians" and this got me so angry. Also on facebook, I've seen groups called "Lets put the Chirst back into Christmas" I for one thought that Christmas was about peace, love and good will to ALL men, whether they're black, white, yellow, christian, Hindu, Pagan, Wicca, Muslim or atheist. Yes, maybe other faiths are to blame for getting 'offended' at 'christian' imagery (Quick list of all the typical christian imagery:

• Star (kinda, stars are also an import pagan imagery as there is the winter star, believed to be the sign of the Horned God)
• Nativity Scene (in all fairness, biggest inaccuracy about xmas, as the bible never says Jesus was born in a stable or anywhere near animals.
• Even the 'angel' on the tree is originally a fairy, a poppet of a tree nymph.

So really, it's more that people are just trying to homogenise everything and the knee jerk reaction is to become bigoted. It's two terrible extremes and I wish everyone would SHUT THE FUCK UP and maybe just go for second "Well, thanks pagans for giving us the christmas we have today"

Being Lazy Online

How’s this for being lazy, thanks to inspiration from Mr. Charles, I now don’t even have to fire up internet explorer (oh noes, I don’t use open source firefox/chrome/whatever) in order to blog. I like the thought of this, it’s somewhat pleasant to blog from my computer rather than a webpage. I have no idea why, kinda irrational.

Ooh boy do I have work to do. This weekend I’m going to dedicated Saturday to working on my edu-game, and Sunday will be the day of essays. The joy! I should be more motivated at least to do my edu-game seeing as there’s a £200 to £300 prize in it for me, which I do have plans for, should I win. I can’t give too much away, but should I win, I’ll take it as fate that I should make said expensive and quite significant purchase. Needless to say, I do want to win, so I’m gonna give it my best.

Right now, I’m still listening to copious amounts of Blue October. I don’t know what it is about their music, but it really moves me. I’m giving a lot of play time to Sound of Bringing Heaven Down, with such great lines as “I wanna show you how fascinating kissing is when Earth collides with all the space in-between” and “make love like time and space is ending”, paired with a really moving guitar/drum rhythm, it’s just a wonderfully positive to song to listen to.

I’m such an emo bastard, lol. When I was visiting my girlfriend Viv, I asked her to spray one of my t-shirts with her perfume. Now, this isn’t because I secretly prefer wearing it to say lynx. Instead, I now have said t-shirt inside my pillow case, so now whenever I go to sleep, I can smell Viv as if she’s next to me. It’s the little things like that that make the long distance thing work. That and a pretty much unlimited phone plan on both our parts. And most importantly, being so madly in love ^_^

Now, in my incredibly artistic and intellectual (lol) style, I’m going to wander aimlessly onto another topic altogether. I was having one of my interesting meanders through my own consciousness last night and had a thought. Would the world be a better place without organised religion? I’m not talking no religion, just no organised religion. No churches, no temples, no synagogues or mosques. Just people worshipping privately and with friends, not being told how to worship. Think about, no one idea could ever seize hold because if people didn’t like it, they’d ignore it. You may still get fanaticism, but you get that with cults anyway. I think if everyone worshipped personally and not as part of some herded group, things would be a lot better. That’s just my opinion, feel free to comment (respectfully) about what you think.

It’s getting late now and I should probably think about sleep. After thinking about it, I should probably do some. Got a few GeekPosts and GamerPosts to come, looking at this week in GeekTV and the Left4Dead 2 demo.

Remember kiddies, you should never accept candy from strangers, unless it’s REALLY good candy.