kerravonsen | Christ is born!

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Crossposts: http://kerravonsen.livejournal.com/987420.html

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christmas

Christ is born!

Well, to be precise, he was born, and we are celebrating the annual reminder of his birth. I do not say "anniversary", since Christ's "birthday" is as about as accurate as the Queen's Birthday in denoting when said person was actually born. Because, let's face it, the shepherds would not be in the fields at night when it was winter time. So Jesus was probably born in April or something like that.

Doubly confusing, of course, is being in the Southern Hemisphere when this hybrid festival was conceived of as a winter-solstice sort of thing, though why it isn't on the actual solstice I can only surmise occurred through calendar drift or the like.

The forecast top for today is 31C. But there is Christmas Pudding Ice Cream in my freezer. Which will be eaten instead of brandy-blazing Christmas Pudding. There's brandy in the ice cream, anyway. I'm very proud of my Christmas Pudding Ice Cream, since I invented the recipe. It really does taste like Christmas Pudding in ice cream form. 8-)

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For the record (because this gets to me), it wasn't a winter solstice festival, which is why it isn't on the solstice! In Jewish thinking of the time, prophets were thought to typically die either on the day they were born or the day of their conception. The day of Jesus's death was (more or less) known; there were Very Serious Arguments about whether to celebrate his birth on the same day or not. "Or not" won, so we celebrate his birth nine months before Easter. "Or not" won to such an extreme degree, in fact, that in the Latin-rite Catholic Church if the feast of the Annunciation would coincide with Easter, the feast of the Annunciation gets moved to avoid that. (In the Eastern rites and in the Eastern Orthodox Churches, it doesn't get moved, and the prayers just get changed a bit.)