Merry Christmas 2024. Can't we let politics and backbiting go, for just one day ?? by SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

And Happy New Year 2025!

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Wednesday, December 25, 2024 1:05 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

And now for something funny ..

protest against the rampant stress and commercialization of Christmas

“The War on Christmas cannot end until Christmas stops its illegal occupation of November. I am calling on the Claus regime to return to the borders agreed upon in the Black Friday Agreement.”

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Wednesday, December 25, 2024 1:27 AM

I essentially stopped shopping around the time they started playing Christmas music at Halloween.

I think people need to reject Christmas. Not the real Christmas if you celebrate that, but this commercialized crap we're inflicted with every year.

Americans going into the Christmas of 2024 season were $1.17 Trillion in credit card debt.

What do you think that number will be next time they update it?

We already know that we can celebrate anything with people whenever we want to because over half the country is divorced and we've been moving everything around because of it for generations now.

Skip Christmas and get together with everybody on the 3rd week of January. That's deep enough into the winter to really have something positive to look forward to, especially in the north-midwest states where everything is dead and miserable 3 months out of the year.

Christmas always comes too early, and then there's just 60 to 90 more miserable days after it depending on how bad the year is, with nothing but the spring to look forward to.

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"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur

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Wednesday, December 25, 2024 3:03 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I personally think there should be something mid-February. About then, winter wears pretty thin.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Wednesday, December 25, 2024 3:19 AM

I guess we can argue about the sweet spot.

By the end of February I'm good. I know it's almost over. But yeah... depending on the winter mid-February can still feel like ages from the end of February.

Been lucky around here for a few years now. I think I put my gutters up in 2019, so of course our last bad winter was immediately following that and we had so much snow with nearly 2 months of temps too low to melt any of it. That didn't stop my barely insulated attic from allowing the heat to melt it though. The insides of my 5" gutters were end to end cold-rolled ice, and I was taking a broom out my back windows and knocking down 3 foot icicles. I remember the hillbilly neighbors down the street had icicles from their 1st floor gutters all the way down to their driveway that year.

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"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur

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Wednesday, December 25, 2024 10:29 AM

I know some people who love the music, I kinda have a love hate relationship with it the whole thing being so commercial, if you were ever in sales, retail! end of year madness! if you ever seen it ever worked in sales on the phone in a store was a mania time of year in t he West and having to listen to those silly annoying pop tunes, same movies on tv, every stressed some family argue. Meet ups they get drunk or stoned or even more drunk and say something offensive and start an argument, people having heart attacks this time of year from the stress.

but there is something nice about the festivity, the lights, the sculptures, the music and the smells of food

'O Radiant Dawn' 'Good-will to men, and peace on Earth' 'Bethlehem Down' 'In Dulci Jubilo' the 'Wexford Carol' that whole Ding Dong Merrily on High toast to Handels merry stuff or Baroque composers
some of the war era subject is interesting Joyeux Noel a movie featuring a moment of peace with Scottish, Germans, French in the trenches or Ceremony of Carols by Benjamin Britten

Long before Romans decided to mark that Christmas thing, long before Emperor Constantine the Great changes faith

there were possibly a lot of old tunes and festivals marking that time of year

Pagan, the Winter Solstice marked by Vikings, Chinese, Native American tribes, Stonehenge, England...getting through t he winter was important

when was Jesus born?

Well that's hard to say because the more you go back in time the more murky history gets, but there possibly was a 'Star of Bethlehem'. Some think supernova but the only supernova that was visible from Earth around the time of Christ's birth actually happened in the year 185 A.D seen by Chinese, it could have been a Comet and Comets are known for their bright, glowing tails and it just never came back
it could have been when planets line up, significant conjunction took place in 7 B.C., when Jupiter and Saturn had three close alignments, there were other ones in August or March but that's not the correct time of year, in 3 B.C., a particularly striking conjunction occurred between Jupiter and Venus and other dates but nothing really goes back to exactly that 25th day of December 0 AD or 0 BC or Common Era as those Atheists call it a lot of people in physics and astronomy suggested the Star of Bethlehem may have actually been a "great conjunction" of bright planets

Others speculate Rome simply moved the date of the Birth of Jesus to be the same time as the Pagans and Celts and Germanic tribes they were trying to defeat
In the Far East a Dongzhi Festival, ancient Egyptian temples are aligned with the winter solstice sunrise, people of Scandinavia which Greeks calls Thule wrote down the events and said Sandinavia held their greatest festival shortly after the winter solstice, to celebrate the return of daylight and it was probably Germanic types or Celt Druids before them who began the tradition of the yule log.
and the Roman festival by way of propaganda used this new Christian festival to get into the Northern troublesome tribes not yet under control of Rome.

or if you believe in stuff it wouldn't be a UFO but a 'Miracle' and that is a matter of faith

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Wednesday, December 25, 2024 10:33 AM

Can Astronomy Explain the Biblical Star of Bethlehem?
https://greekreporter.com/2024/12/07/astronomy-biblical-star-bethlehem/

From Jupiter to Jesus: unraveling the mystery of the Bethlehem Star
https://cybernews.com/editorial/bethlehem-star-explained/

Gloria in Excelsis Deo! What was the Star of Bethlehem?
https://www.thebostonpilot.com/article.php/special/Pilot_20240202_Barb
osa/special/article.php?ID=198770

Leontovych was shot by a Soviet chekist named Afanasy Hrishchenko, shot the composer, and robbed the family.

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Wednesday, December 25, 2024 2:18 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

JAYNZE, my memories of Christmas are almost magical, a mashed- together conglomeration of Baby Jesus, Santa Claus, Christmas trees, and Christmas lights shining thru the snow.

So, the parts that stand out in my memory:

As maybe a 5 year old, creeping downstairs in the dark with my two sisters, and plugging in the Christmas tree lights and trying to guess what was in the boxes, not giggling too loud bc mom and dad were still asleep. (When we were little they would put up the Christmas tree Christmas eve night, when we were asleep. When we were REALLY little, they would put the tree in the playpen, I was told).

As we got older, helping decorate the tree. Dad would cut off a half inch and stick the tree in a bucket of sand in the basement until it was time to put it up in the livingroom. The smell of pine thru the house. Setting up the manger scene under the tree. Lights, ornaments, and tinsel.

Anxiously waiting for snowflakes for Christmas.

Waiting to be old enough to go to Midnight Mass. Seeing a bright moon thru bare tree branches in a dark midnight sky, small clouds scudding across its face. Quiet, quiet stillness.

Helping bake Christmas cookies. Family get togethers. Fancy desserts.

And especially... taking our evening stroll with dad, Christmas lights on nearly every house, shining on (and sometimes thru) the snow. Strings under the eaves, or maybe around a door and porch railing, or wrapped around a shrub. Not a competition but because that's what one did at Christmas: make the neighborhood pretty. Maybe I over interpreted as a child, but what that told me was that people cared. Enough to go thru the effort of putting up something pretty.

To this day, I can't let Christmas go by without putting up a string of lights. Colored lights, mind you!

I could never get behind the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, triumphalist mentality, but the story of Baby Jesus, Silent Night ... THAT resonated.

Every western child should have lovely memories like that.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Wednesday, December 25, 2024 4:06 PM

That's a nice memory.

I have one good Christmas memory. My younger brothers don't even have that.

Chrismas for us was spending it at a different place every year, custody battles, drama and bullshit.

Just give me my video games and leave me the hell alone until I go back to school. Both of you do it for the 364 other days of the year, so it shouldn't be too hard for you to today. Thank you. Bye bye.

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"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur

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Wednesday, December 25, 2024 5:35 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Oh, that's too sad, SIX.

Of course, those are my best memories. And a lot was colored by the fact that I was a happy, placid child. My one sister has a bad case of ADHD, and her memories are very different, because what she mostly remembers is a lot of mental noise that kept her from enjoying the moment, and a lot of frustration and emotional turmoil from being criticized for things she couldn't help. That was before they knew about ADHD.

And of course I didn't remain a happy child, I fell intomone of those deep, existential Eastern European depressions when I was younger than 10, bedeviled by questions like "what if this reality is just a dream, and not even my dream but someone else's? ". Feeling feelings I was too young to understand and axking questions I was too young to answer. (Turns out I recapitulated a lot of modern western philosophy without knowing it.)

And by the time I was 12ish, mom started drinking pretty heavily (and didn't stop until I was about 25, married and out of the house already), dad was suffering from hypoglycemic episodes (as well as PTSD) and often looked like a volcano ready to erupt, and things were pretty tense and miserable.

But still. I have lovely memories, and that's what I remember most.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Wednesday, December 25, 2024 6:33 PM

I remember being 6 years old, lying in my mom's bed next to her and just talking about things. It was after Christmas, probably during Christmas break. This would have been about a year after the divorce, and before my mom started a career and became a miserable person for most of the rest of her life.

I said, "Santa isn't real, is he?". And looking back on my entire childhood, her reply was probably the best parenting that either of mine accidentally stumbled into over 18 years of mistakes. She said "No. Santa isn't real. But I'd like to think that there's a little bit of Santa in all of us."

Kinda Hallmarky and trite, I know, but I can't think of a better response to that question from a 6 year old, and I've always given her credit for that one.

I'd already figured out at 6 years old on my own that Santa was bullshit. I don't think that had anything to do with intelligence, because I think even extremely intelligent children could go well into their teen years without questioning it if their family life were copacetic and nobody ruined that at school for them. It's because the veil over all of that just got lifted by being forced to endure all of that unexplainable fallout of a divorce when you're too young to even understand why or how any of it could have happened, because you're still too young to question how Santa got into your house when you have no chimney and the windows are locked, or how he delivers presents to every boy and girl in one night, or why santa's elves were working for Atari and Parker Brothers and Mattel.

To me, Santa was just another betrayal. The first betrayal.

What a great lie to tell your children during their formative years. I think subconsciously the damage done to the kids who had good memories and a healthy family life was even greater than the messed up kids like me, just by virtue of the fact they had a much more solid foundation to undermine.

Yeah... It's all cute, and parents love the whole idea of Christmas and how excited their kids get knowing that Santa is coming tonight to give you what you wanted for being a good boy or girl... And those kids grow up to be parents of their own and do the exact same thing with their kids...

But it's all a lie. A huge lie that's all around us every year. Most of us don't even notice it because it's what we grew up with and it's what our kids and grandkids grew up with. We all just assume it's what our parents grew up with, and their parents before them too.

Every kid at some time is going to figure out Santa was a lie their parents told them. Some will figure this out on their own and either disregard their mother's pleas and tell all the other kids at school that Santa wasn't real. Some, like I was, will follow their mother's wishes and not ruin that for everyone else and just sit there alone with the knowledge that Santa isn't real, not even discussing it with their best friend at sleepovers, or their two younger brothers who they spend most of their non-school time with.

I always thought I was one of the lucky ones to figure it out as early as I did and I wasn't like the poor kids who figured it out last in some big dramatic way. Some long-forgotten-by-everyone-else memory of being ridiculed for still believing in that lie, although they never forgot that incident no matter how hard they tried to never think of it again.

But I dunno about that anymore. In what world should a 6 year old kid with knowledge of the truth be told to hide that truth from everyone else? That's not a formative year lesson I'd be wanting to teach any child of mine.

For all I know with how stupid our monkey brain chemistry works, my preference for being alone most of the time might actually have stemmed directly from the isolation I felt by keeping that secret.

I couldn't even tell you what I thought the ideal way to figure it out, or the ideal time to finally be told the truth, and the aftermath of that would be. The more I think about this, I don't think the people who figured it out somewhere in the middle really had it much better than the first kid and the last kid to know.

Even if they don't have an impossible-to-bury memory of being ridiculed for being too old to believe, or are forced to join in on the lie and hide the truth from everyone else, there's still that underlying sense of betrayal from the two people that you're still likely to love and trust more than anyone.

I remember first thinking about all this when I was still living at my Grandma's in my early 20's and having this conversation with her. I wasn't able to express my point the way I wanted to back then though. Though a deeply devoted Christian, she thought it was just wrong for me to say that any children of mine would not ever be told there was an magic man coming to give them presents every year if they behaved themselves. She loved all of it. She did it for all of her kids and then again for all the grand kids. She didn't seem to have any of the negative memories or emotions attached to it. It's too late now to ask her how she found out Santa wasn't real.

And yanno... now that I'm writing it out like this, I realize that even if I had kids of my own and I taught them from the start that Santa wasn't real and that everyone else they went to school was going to believe that he was real... then I would have just been doing to them half of what was done to me.

Now they'd be forced to go to school and be isolated on day one from everyone else during Christmas because they had knowledge of the truth when everyone else in class is living a collective lie that will come to an end for them in a matter of years as well. And that isolation would almost certainly bleed into everything else beyond keeping just that one secret at Christmas time.

But at least there wouldn't have been that betrayal.

I dunno.

Shit...

Until if and when all this ever changed, maybe I should just tell the hypothetical kid the lie. Sparing the kid the isolation that comes from secrets at that young age is probably well worth the tradeoff of knowing that will eventually be the first betrayal when they figure out it wasn't real.

Sometimes you have to do things you know aren't right, even knowing that it will eventually cause pain one day. I guess you just hope you raised them right and one day they become an adult and understand why you lied to them, and why they should probably continue the lie with their own children.

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"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur

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Wednesday, December 25, 2024 6:56 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Santa was never an issue for me. It was always just a cute story that we heard about, but my folks clued us in early and without stress when we started picking out gifts for other people. I just liked the general ambience and beauty.

What threw me for a loop was Catholicism. I grew up with the kinder, gentler, Pope John XXIII version ("and the greatest of these was love"), not the strict punishment version. Sure, there were things about catechism I went "huh"? about, but there were parts that really resonated. Being kind to people worse off than you. A guardian angel watching over me. Baby Jesus. It matched my personality. But at some point ... again, I was pretty young ... I realized it was all untrue, or at least not provable. And once I started questioning things I had previously believed, I started questioning EVERYTHING, including the nature of reality. Until I had to just accept what I now know is an "a priori' assumption and just act AS IF everything around me was real.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Wednesday, December 25, 2024 8:20 PM

in some places they don't celebrate

and Some guy with a Hindu Nepal Sanskrit name arrived in SKorea and tried to make sense of it all

for the rest its Buddhism, Atheists and a strange Pagan Asia Folk religion

and its in the Indian Sub Continent

Worship song

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Wednesday, December 25, 2024 11:16 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
I realized it was all untrue, or at least not provable. And once I started questioning things I had previously believed, I started questioning EVERYTHING, including the nature of reality. Until I had to just accept what I now know is an "a priori' assumption and just act AS IF everything around me was real.

This is why I kinda laugh when THUGR keeps assuming I "believe" my sources. I don't. He does, tho. He can't imagine NOT believing.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Wednesday, December 25, 2024 11:49 PM

BRENDA

I've had a love/hate relationship with the season ever since my dad died when I was 13. Before that Christmas was just something that came around once a year. My mom liked Christmas music and we always had a tree up and presents. My dad would cook a turkey or ham with the usual trimmings.

I stopped believing Santa when I heard my mum and dad getting the presents out of their hiding place to put under the tree. Think I was around 8. Had to keep quiet about it because of my brother.

There was no big religious goings on. My mum put up a nativity scene. Very small that sat on a dresser top.

As I got into my teenage years it just became a bother because my friends had their fathers, so that was depressing.

You would think I would start enjoying Christmas after almost dying but it had no affect on me. Had one year where I thought yes, maybe I can enjoy it again but then Blair died 3 weeks before my birthday and that took the wind out of my sails.

My mum started really enjoying Christmas in her later years and all I want to do is rip the wiring out of sound systems when I hear carols. Can't stand them.

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Thursday, December 26, 2024 2:35 AM

Can't blame you with that back story, Brenda.

I think this might have been the first Christmas season I've had where I haven't heard one song or seen 1 minute of footage of any TV show or movie.

Christmas has never been the same since Covid. What little stuff was still going on just got smashed with a wrecking ball, and now all of the sudden the few people in the family who are still alive and/or haven't moved out of state go out to the east coast to celebrate it.

I was out by my friend's family's place for Thanksgiving like we've done 3 years in a row now, but they had something going on both days for Christmas this year. I was invited to one of them, and I appreciate that, but I didn't want to be dragged along to some place where there's a ton of people I didn't know.

Plus, that's like their own thing. I don't want to intrude on that. I think it's great that their family seems to be getting over all that covid and partisan bullshit and they actually can get together again.

Who knows? Now that they're getting together again maybe I meet some of these people at parties they'd throw. They have one hell of a house to throw parties. If I got to know them beforehand maybe I would pop in one Christmas if they asked me again.

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"My only fear of death is coming back to this bitch reincarnated." ~Tupac Shakur

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Thursday, December 26, 2024 4:40 AM

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Belated Merry Christmas to all.

Apparently this marks 100 years since the birth of Rod Serling.
I also didn't realize this is 40 years after the first Mannheim Steamroller Christmas Music (1984).

As a child, my paternal grandparents went to their Winter Home in Florida. So Thanksgiving was the family holiday, with all the Christmas stuff except snow. This was usually the one day of the year we got to see our cousins on that side. My father and his sister could not be in the same building without their parents present to moderate. a few days after that, they would drive to Florida.

My maternal grandparents were 300 miles north, on the shores of Lake Superior. For Christmas and New Year, we would go there. usually lots of snow, and snowmobiles. The week would be spent visiting all of the further relatives, continuing to live in the area.
Our favorite grandparent was maternal grandpa. He died a month after Christmas during my 9th grade.

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Thursday, December 26, 2024 7:22 AM