2011 Virtual Advent Tour: The Joy of Giving

I love presents. Who doesn't, right? But I seriously LOVE them. I love thinking about them and choosing them and listing them and buying them and wrapping them and putting them under the tree. I love watching family and friends open presents I chose for them. And of course I love getting presents myself.

We've always been a tad present-crazy in my family. None of this one-present-per-person thing for us! Kids especially benefit from this craziness, but since young kids are only recent in our family, my brother and I were the ones who were showered with gifts. Now there's Shane and present-buying focuses on him, which is so much fun.

As for traditions to do with Christmas presents... In Poland, we celebrate on Christmas Eve. We sit down to dinner at 5 or 6, as soon as it's dark. We are allowed  to open presents as soon as we spot the first star in the sky. I can remember my brother and I standing with our noses glued to the window, watching out for that first star. We've lived in some pretty polluted countries though, so sometimes this tradition had to be abandoned.

Now we don't really watch out for that star anymore, we open gifts after the first course. And then again on Christmas morning. (and we already have a first Christmas at the beginning of December, for family reasons, so this isn't even the first holiday event!).

My favorite part is still watching others open gifts I chose for them. Such a joy to see their smiling faces. :-)

Now, head on over to the other bloggers who are part of the 2011 Virtual Advent Tour today:

Cat @ Beyond Books

Tami @ Just One More Thing

Bridget @ Meals on Winthrop

Sharon @ Faith, Hope, & Cherrytea

Happy Holidays to all of you, may they be peaceful and joyful for you and your loved ones!

A book unfinished and a book postponed

I've spread myself a bit thin on the reading front lately, starting too many books at once and not finishing anything. One of these books will have to remain unfinished I think. I've been reading Eric Segal's The Class on and off for months and can't seem to care enough about the characters to get through it at any sort of reasonable pace. It's not bad or anything, the story is interesting enough I guess, but the style and the choppy chapters irritate me. I know he's all famous and I remember loving Love Story, both book and movie, but this just isn't doing it for me.

Another book will have to be postponed. I've been working on The Winter Solstice: The Sacred Traditions of Christmas by John Matthews and already wrote one post on pagan midwinter traditions. I read a couple more chapters now and have plenty of notes and ideas, but with Christmas long gone both reading it and writing about it don't seem appropriate. So I decided to leave writing anything more on the subject until next December when it's all Christmassy again.

So there. On to the other five or six books I have going! :-)

The Pagan Roots of Christmas, part 1

For a few years now, I have been very interested in pagan religions, as well as pre-Christian and early Christian Europe. I love knowing where things - ideas, traditions, symbols - come from. This is one of the reasons for why Pagan Europe is one of my themes for the One, Two, Theme! challenge I'm co-hosting with Alex.

Some of those who have already signed up for this challenge have asked if they could start reading early, before the start of 2011, and we said 'sure'. So I started with reading The Winter Solstice: The Sacred Traditions of Christmas by John Matthews. I've only read two chapters so far, but there is so much in that I want to talk about already that I decided to write several posts, as I gather interesting tidbits to share with you.

I already knew that Christmas celebrations are loosely based on the Roman feast of Saturnalia, a festival dedicated to Saturn, God of agriculture, which lasted from 17 to 24 December. Masters and slaves switched places, schools were closed and everyone ate and drank themselves silly for the duration. One of the Saturnalia traditions was gift-giving, which is where our own tradition comes from.

I did not know, however, that Saturnalia was followed by the Kalends festival, in which the gaiety continued with people in masks (including animal masks) went around singing and dancing. This tradition is still alive and kicking in many countries, including in mine, Poland, where (in certain regions) when Christmas is over youngsters dress up and go around singing and dancing, hoping to collect coins from their grateful audience. The young Poles who do this are called kolędnicy, a name which is too similar to Kalends to ignore the connection.

I also knew that lots of our Christmas traditions come from paganism - this makes sense of course, since Christianity was built on what was already there. John Matthews' book is giving me a lot more detail though and since it all fascinates me, I wanted to share some of that detail with you.

Loads of traditions all over the world have a story of a wonder, miracle child being born. In ancient Rome, it was Apollo's birthday that was celebrated on December 25th and this came from a celebration of the Sun on the same date. Apparently, the Church didn't make December 25th Jesus' birthday until the 4th century...

After Apollo, it was an Iranian/Persian deity called Mithras who celebrated on December 25th. Mithras dates back to the 6th century BC and was very popular in Rome. Some of the parallels between his life and that of Jesus are incredible, including that when he died he didn't really die, he ascended to heaven and will come back at the end of time to participate in judgement.

Emperor Constantine, who is credited with making Christianity the state Roman religion, was himself a follower of Mithras before he converted. Even after, he kept links to paganism, especially to sun worship.

(Constantine was not only the first Christian Roman Emperor, he was the one who transformed the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium into Constantinople.)

The story of Egyptian God Osiris also has similarities to Jesus' story. Osiris was murdered by his brother Set, who dismembered him and hid the pieces all over Egypt. His consort Isis restored him to life on December 25th.

I'd tell you about some of the others, but then I would just be copying the whole book out here and that wouldn't really be an efficient use of my time. :-)

Enough rambling for one post, I think - except to say again how much I love to read about where our traditions come from. Like the 12 days of Christmas, which start on December 25th and end on January 5th. Here in Belgium, on January 6th they have cakes with a hidden ring in each - whoever finds the ring wears a crown for the day, similarly to the master/slave reversal that was part of the original Saturnalia festival in ancient Rome.

These old traditions are alive all over the world - just the other day raidergirl was explaining how attached people on Prince Edward Island are to Old Christmas, on January 5th. I think it wonderful that communities like hers are keeping tradition alive.

Random thoughts... and a delicious cake!

I lost my voice. And am home sick for the rest of the week. I could have done without tonsilitis during this particular week, I have too much going on at work, but that's the way the cookie crumbles I guess. I had a Christmas concert yesterday, it's only afterwards that my voice went completely, but I have another next Saturday so I hope it comes back!!!

We had our first Christmas celebration on Saturday! Joe's daughter Helen was over for the weekend and we did Christmas because we're not seeing each other for the 'real' one. It's really amazing what you can accomplish when you put all your energy into it; we were all really surprised at how Christmassy it was! Everything was exactly as it should be, with the tree, the presents, the yummy Christmas dinner, the drinking starting in the afternoon...  We are Irish and Polish after all! ;-)

Helen gave me a gorgeous cook book - all cakes and other sweet stuff - that I'd never heard of. Red Velvet Chocolate Heartache by Harry Eastwood. Do any of you have it? It's a beautiful, beautiful book with lovely photos and wonderful writing. Clearly, Harry loves her food. She (yes, she) also loves creating healthy versions of things we love to eat, like brownies and cookies and cakes. The recipes in this book all have some strange ingredients, such as grated potato, butternut squash or parsnip. And they use rice flour or spelt flour, plus ground almonds, although you can use the same quantity of regular flour if you prefer. I was intrigued that I immediately made the Banana and Toffee Sticky Cake and my oh my is it good! If the rest of the bakes in here are this yummy then we'll be living on a strict diet of cakes for a long time!

I leave you with a photo of my cake - sticky and moist and very, very more-ish. This book makes a brilliant present, maybe one of your family friends would appreciate it?