DoomYoshi wrote:Dukasaur wrote:Putting up with Christmas nonsense should be restricted to the period of Dec 21st (to celebrate the holiday's true meaning as a pagan celebration of the solstice) to the actual day of Christian Christmas on Jan 7th.
This is the kind of nonsense up with which I shall not put.
- "true meaning" does not fit this sentence at all. By making up an artificial meaning for yourself does not make it 'true'. The first mention of Christmas refers to it as "For the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th, Wednesday, while Augustus was in his forty-second year, but from Adam, five thousand and five hundred years. He suffered in the thirty-third year, March 25th, Friday, the eighteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, while Rufus and Roubellion were Consuls." (taken from a commentary on Daniel by Hippolytus c.170-235). So to get "true meaning" of "when he was born in Bethlehem" to be the 'solstice' makes no sense. Even the much later Chronograph of 354 refers to Christmas as "Birth of Christ in Bethlehem of Judea".
- Nobody claims the actual day of Christian Christmas is January 7th. The Orthodox liturgical calendar celebrates it on December 25th. However, they observe December 25th on the day that we chose as January 7th. This isn't unique to Christmas. They celebrate all the days 13 days apart from us since the year 1900. In 2100, it will move to a 14 day gap and every hundred years (or 200) the gap will increase by a day until eventually the calendars are reunited for a hundred (or 200) years. That should happen in AD 48 900.
- Every day is a fitting day to celebrate the Incarnation, when God became flesh, the infinite became finite, the eternal became temporal. Without that, there would be no hope for mankind.
If the Eastern (Orthodox) Church would adopt the Gregorian calendar, and give up the much less accurate Julian calendar, this problem (January 7) would be solved.
There were two reasons to establish the Gregorian calendar. First, the Julian calendar assumed incorrectly that the average solar year is exactly 365.25 days long, an overestimate of a little under one day per century, and thus has a leap year every four years without exception. The Gregorian reform shortened the average (calendar) year by 0.0075 days to stop the drift of the calendar with respect to the equinoxes.[3] Second, in the years since the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325,[b] the excess leap days introduced by the Julian algorithm had caused the calendar to drift such that the (Northern) spring equinox was occurring well before its nominal 21 March date. This date was important to the Christian churches because it is fundamental to the calculation of the date of Easter. To reinstate the association, the reform advanced the date by 10 days:[c] Thursday 4 October 1582 was followed by Friday 15 October 1582.[3] In addition, the reform also altered the lunar cycle used by the Church to calculate the date for Easter, because astronomical new moons were occurring four days before the calculated dates. Whilst the reform introduced minor changes, the calendar continued to be fundamentally based on the same geocentric theory as its predecessor.[4]
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By any criterion, the Gregorian calendar is substantially more accurate than the 1 day in 128 years error of the Julian calendar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendarBUT, the most important point here is stated very well by both Duk and DY:
Every day is a fitting day to celebrate the Incarnation, when God became flesh, the infinite became finite, the eternal became temporal. Without that, there would be no hope for mankind.
Yeah, it's never a bad time to be joyful, whatever the reason. All the best.
I totally agree. Let me say it here: Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year to ALL.
I am grateful for good discussions and enjoy the challenge to offer good arguments and to find information to learn more and to sharpen my mental faculties.
