re: #302 KGxvi

Easter is even more fun for this kind of thing. It really does amaze me though how many Christians don’t understand (or more likely don’t want to understand) that there really aren’t many differences between their religious traditions and a lot of pagan traditions

The religious antecedents of these “War on Christmas” wingnuts would have put someone in the stocks for acknowledging Christmas in any way. As late as the Civil War era, many (possibly most) Americans didn’t celebrate Christmas—it was regarded as an exclusively Catholic holiday. It was around then that the observations we know came filtering in from England, but even there they were really brought in by Prince Albert from Germany. Of course a lot of the Christmas “traditions” we think are ancient were created out of whole cloth by Norman Rockwell in the 1930s.