Hoi, I find it funny to be writing about this subject as I do not believe in any God.
I am heavily involved in Wiktionary and one of the things that is a constant issue is how to promote the things we think important. Not only would we like to have a bigger community, we would also like more sophisticated software to support what we do. Every now and again there are things that make our life easier. One of these things was the introduction of Commons as it allowed us to have soundfiles that can be used in ANY project.
The wikimedia projects have a rule that the only soundfiles allowed are the .ogg files. This is a handicap as many people do not have software to play these files. So the only way to have people GET the necessary software is by making these files more relevant. The next question is HOW do you make them relevant. Sabine of the Italian wiktioanry had this brilliant idea of asking people to contribute to a list she had with Christmass wishes. A month ago we started to ask people to contribute translations of *"Buon Natale e felice Anno Nuovo!" and record the pronunciation as well using the .ogg format. It proved to be a struggle to get translations and an even bigger stuggle to get soundfiles.
We have been really gratefull for the contributions that we got. In so many ways we were happy with the responses that we had. We had people explain about their Christmas, we learned that Happy Newyear is only said in Japan once the new year has started. We learned that the Armenian christmas is on another day from the Western and the Eastern traditions. It was really good fun. Still, it was a wiktionary project and religious contributions that were added were deleted from the pages being not relevant to a lexicological project.
On Christmas eve, I added wishes to several projects among them the en:wikipedia as this was the moment were we could expect a big amount of people to help in our effort. This was not to be. Apparantly not only is the American society very religious. They are also very "correct" about it. Some said that because the "C" word was used (christmas) it could not be on a wikimedia page. "Because it would have the wikimedia organisation endorse Christmas". I was am and am utterly amazed. My exhortions that it had little to do with christmas and everything to do with the promotion of all these wikimedia values was to no avail.. This was "SO WRONG".. :( So I found myself in a revert war. And was told that because of Christmas I was not banned).
I am still amazed about this. Another thing that happened in this timeframe was this "minkukel" (you can look the word up on the nl:wiktionary) who added a picture of a pig and some foul language on a template called "Islam" on the nl:wikipedia. Now THIS I knew to be wrong; so I deleted the references to this template and put it up for deletion for this is sacrilidge. I am still amazed about our community that some find it necessary that we cannot, under the pretext of neutrality, have a project like our Italian wiktionary project because of the anti-religious ideas that they harbour.
I do not understand it. I do not care for these uptight attitudes. I hope that next time when people ask for contributions like we did for our **"Buon Natale e felice Anno Nuovo!" project that people will be less rigid and more forthcoming. I am aware that some people will be angry with me for saying all this. But hey, I am still reeling from this experience.
Thanks, GerardM
PS If you care to have a look at the Italian project, http://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/Buon_Natale_e_felice_Anno_Nuovo%21
** *****
On Mon, Dec 27, 2004 at 04:46:13PM +0100, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
The wikimedia projects have a rule that the only soundfiles allowed are the .ogg files. This is a handicap as many people do not have software to play these files. So the only way to have people GET the necessary software is by making these files more relevant. The next question is HOW do you make them relevant.
On de: we have now 35 spoken articles, some quite outdated but it's a beginning. All ogg of course.
About the other things, I think you should retry it but this time include all the other big religious events like Ramadan, Chanukka, Chinese New Year etc.
ciao, tom
Thomas R. Koll wrote:
On Mon, Dec 27, 2004 at 04:46:13PM +0100, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
The wikimedia projects have a rule that the only soundfiles allowed are the .ogg files. This is a handicap as many people do not have software to play these files. So the only way to have people GET the necessary software is by making these files more relevant. The next question is HOW do you make them relevant.
On de: we have now 35 spoken articles, some quite outdated but it's a beginning. All ogg of course.
About the other things, I think you should retry it but this time include all the other big religious events like Ramadan, Chanukka, Chinese New Year etc.
ciao, tom
For the nl:wiktionary we have over 300 sound files with pronunciations of words in the Dutch language alone. They are much easier to use than phonetic notations. As such it would be cool to have the standard pronunciations recorded and available from Commons for all wiktionary words.
As to the project. There are many more projects in wiktionary that are more important than also having wishes for ramadan, chanukka just to satisfy this false sense of "equality" of some. When someone starts to record these wishes in wiktionary, I will be happy to lend a hand.
On the English wiktionary there is a project to have the 1000 "most important" words defined and translated to many languages. There are people experimenting with bots that may automagically copy content from one wiktionary to another. There are the many thousands of words that we would like to add to the wikitonaries and have in files on our local harddisks. There are the phrases that people may want to know when they go abroud. There are the ideas about a next generation wiktionary. There is the GEMET data that we really want to include in the wiktionaries. There is so much more going on than just this project that was intended as a fun thing to do.
The "Buon Natale" project was a small fun project with an intentional small scope. We love it. It was and is fun. But it is what we made it and not what someone else wants it to be. I am not aware of people sending cards at chanukka or ramadan. I also do not know if and how you say "Happy Ramandan". We have written several times during the last month or so about our project and everytime we asked people to contribute and expand the project by writing about the traditions that they know. Not only but also about their christmas.
So again, do write about channuka and ramandan in wikipedia and do add relevant phrases and words in wiktionary. Inform us about the difference times of the start of ramadan. About the three days of the birth of Jezus. About the differences in the way a christmastree is decorated in Italy compared to Germany. About the carp as a traditional dish at easter in Poland. But other people do have different sensibilities and do not make what you believe override everything and everyone else believes and values. To me the censorship of the "Bon Natale" project was a nasty surprise, to me it shows an intolerance that I had not expected from the wikipedia crowd.
There will be other projects and other moments, that will be mo
Thanks, GerardM
On Mon, Dec 27, 2004 at 07:22:51PM +0100, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Thomas R. Koll wrote:
On de: we have now 35 spoken articles, some quite outdated but it's a beginning. All ogg of course.
For the nl:wiktionary we have over 300 sound files with pronunciations of words in the Dutch language alone. They are much easier to use than phonetic notations. As such it would be cool to have the standard pronunciations recorded and available from Commons for all wiktionary words.
I wasn't talking about pronunciations of words but whole articles.
ciao, tom
I. Christmas is the holiday previously known as Yule or Yuletide. It was a northern European seasonal festival since time immemorial. If (and only if) you consider Yuletide to have been a religious holiday, it was a NON-Christian religious holiday. But AFAIK Yuletide was a seasonal festival in the first instance -- only possibly with associated (non-Christian) religious connotations in the second instance.
II. Yuletide became known as Christmas thanks to the goody old three-E-method (of latter-day Microsoft fame): Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. The Christian church of the day was running a major conversion effort. They quickly found they couldn't beat old and cherished traditions such as Yuletide. So they accepted it as a legitimate festival into the church calendar, they added Christian symbolism and merged it with Christian ideology (most notably the holiday was "calculated"/defined to match Jesus of Nazareth's birth), and finally the entire festival got usurped and monopolized by Christianity. (Yuletide symbols/traditions such as Christmas trees and mistletoe still remain. Even Santa Claus is based on a Yuletide figure, I hear.)
Why am I telling you this?
Well, IMHO "Christmas" is in actuality a quite secular festival. It ''used to be such'' before those Christian missionaries came to northern Europe and ''it is again today''. Millions if not billions of non-Christians happily celebrate Christmas all over the world. Which leads to another point I'd like to make: IMHO "Christmas" (or "xmas") has become a GENERIC term and to many, many people all over the world "Christmas" simply denotes the festival around this time in the year (which again was previously known as Yuletide), and to many, many non-Christians it doesn't matter in the least that etymologically speaking the word "Christmas" carries with it that later added Christian connotation. For example millions of Japanese Shinto-Buddhists are quite happy to celebrate Christmas without wanting to become Christians. I too am quite happy to celebrate Christmas (and to call it "Christmas"), despite me being a budding polytheist whose religious beliefs and ethics are decidedly at odds with Christian ones.
And it's not just me to think so: Some French school recently found itself challenged (in protest) by pupils to remove a Christmas tree as a supposedly "conspicuous religious symbol". The tree was restored after it was officially ruled that Christmas trees are pagan symbols: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/05E40EA7-8A8C-486E-BF0E -8F257310AB5E.htm
IMHO braindead practices of avoiding to say "Merry Christmas" (spearheaded by corporate America, for fear of some dimwitted non-Christian suing) actually REINFORCE the mistaken perception of Christmas as a Christian holiday. ("Happy Holidays." Oh feck off.) I mean, I'm not trying to be a spoilsport to Christians here. If you're Christian and you consider Christmas a Christian holiday, well, fine by me. Just don't expect everybody else to agree.
For the above reasons, I believe any and all concerns over Gerard's very nice, harmless and well-intended "Merry Christmas and happy New Year"-project (http://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/Buon_Natale_e_felice_Anno_Nuovo%21) are totally unnecessary and inappropriate. Only someone ignorant of both the origins of Christmas and the extent to which Christmas is presently celebrated by followers of the majority of non-Christian religions of the world could have found fault with Gerard's idea. Thank you Gerard. :)
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year !!!
:-) :) :-D
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
Without commenting on my side on the issue, I think I should note that paganism is a religion as well, and thus symbols of paganism are religious symbols. That is however separate from the issue of whether or not it's OK for us to display religious symbols.
Recently there was a small debate on it.wikipedia about their holiday logo (there was a poll before it was displayed, but some people believed that the poll doesn't matter if the logo is against policy) with objections similar to the ones on fr.wikipedia when they faced a similar issue. One person said something along the lines of "I find it ironic that we should display symbols of Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, etc. holidays when the audience of this Wikipedia itself is so religiously homogenous" (however, the person who said it was still in favor of having festive logos for holidays from these faiths anyways). This is a very good point (besides the fact that their are Muslims, Jews, and Hindus who speak Italian, and the fact that Italian is spoken as a second language in Somalia [the people there couldn't read the Somali Wikipedia instead since it currently has only a couple of articles], Libya...).
But there is an equally good point: if we celebrated a "Chechnya independence day" with a logo of that theme, there would be many objections because it indicates support for a cause. I think that perhaps there are some comparisons that can be drawn here...
Mark
On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 03:42:55 +0100, Jens Ropers ropers@ropersonline.com wrote:
I. Christmas is the holiday previously known as Yule or Yuletide. It was a northern European seasonal festival since time immemorial. If (and only if) you consider Yuletide to have been a religious holiday, it was a NON-Christian religious holiday. But AFAIK Yuletide was a seasonal festival in the first instance -- only possibly with associated (non-Christian) religious connotations in the second instance.
II. Yuletide became known as Christmas thanks to the goody old three-E-method (of latter-day Microsoft fame): Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. The Christian church of the day was running a major conversion effort. They quickly found they couldn't beat old and cherished traditions such as Yuletide. So they accepted it as a legitimate festival into the church calendar, they added Christian symbolism and merged it with Christian ideology (most notably the holiday was "calculated"/defined to match Jesus of Nazareth's birth), and finally the entire festival got usurped and monopolized by Christianity. (Yuletide symbols/traditions such as Christmas trees and mistletoe still remain. Even Santa Claus is based on a Yuletide figure, I hear.)
Why am I telling you this?
Well, IMHO "Christmas" is in actuality a quite secular festival. It ''used to be such'' before those Christian missionaries came to northern Europe and ''it is again today''. Millions if not billions of non-Christians happily celebrate Christmas all over the world. Which leads to another point I'd like to make: IMHO "Christmas" (or "xmas") has become a GENERIC term and to many, many people all over the world "Christmas" simply denotes the festival around this time in the year (which again was previously known as Yuletide), and to many, many non-Christians it doesn't matter in the least that etymologically speaking the word "Christmas" carries with it that later added Christian connotation. For example millions of Japanese Shinto-Buddhists are quite happy to celebrate Christmas without wanting to become Christians. I too am quite happy to celebrate Christmas (and to call it "Christmas"), despite me being a budding polytheist whose religious beliefs and ethics are decidedly at odds with Christian ones.
And it's not just me to think so: Some French school recently found itself challenged (in protest) by pupils to remove a Christmas tree as a supposedly "conspicuous religious symbol". The tree was restored after it was officially ruled that Christmas trees are pagan symbols: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/05E40EA7-8A8C-486E-BF0E -8F257310AB5E.htm
IMHO braindead practices of avoiding to say "Merry Christmas" (spearheaded by corporate America, for fear of some dimwitted non-Christian suing) actually REINFORCE the mistaken perception of Christmas as a Christian holiday. ("Happy Holidays." Oh feck off.) I mean, I'm not trying to be a spoilsport to Christians here. If you're Christian and you consider Christmas a Christian holiday, well, fine by me. Just don't expect everybody else to agree.
For the above reasons, I believe any and all concerns over Gerard's very nice, harmless and well-intended "Merry Christmas and happy New Year"-project (http://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/Buon_Natale_e_felice_Anno_Nuovo%21) are totally unnecessary and inappropriate. Only someone ignorant of both the origins of Christmas and the extent to which Christmas is presently celebrated by followers of the majority of non-Christian religions of the world could have found fault with Gerard's idea. Thank you Gerard. :)
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year !!!
:-) :) :-D
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
So long as Wikimedia isn't advocating a religion, simply presenting phrases or pictures from religions doesn't seem very objectionable to me unless the person objecting has some anti-religion motives. Simply saying, "This is what religion x says/believes/does during December," then there is no harm done. But the line is drawn when Wikimedia says, "You all must believe X and worship Y." And that was not done here. Anyone getting in a huff over it should get over it.
Anyhow, "Sælige Crístesmæsse and sælig níwe géar" in Anglo-Saxon. Sælige Crístesmæsse everyone!!!!!
James
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Mark Williamson Sent: Monday, December 27, 2004 10:12 PM To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Religious intolerance
Without commenting on my side on the issue, I think I should note that paganism is a religion as well, and thus symbols of paganism are religious symbols. That is however separate from the issue of whether or not it's OK for us to display religious symbols.
Recently there was a small debate on it.wikipedia about their holiday logo (there was a poll before it was displayed, but some people believed that the poll doesn't matter if the logo is against policy) with objections similar to the ones on fr.wikipedia when they faced a similar issue. One person said something along the lines of "I find it ironic that we should display symbols of Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, etc. holidays when the audience of this Wikipedia itself is so religiously homogenous" (however, the person who said it was still in favor of having festive logos for holidays from these faiths anyways). This is a very good point (besides the fact that their are Muslims, Jews, and Hindus who speak Italian, and the fact that Italian is spoken as a second language in Somalia [the people there couldn't read the Somali Wikipedia instead since it currently has only a couple of articles], Libya...).
But there is an equally good point: if we celebrated a "Chechnya independence day" with a logo of that theme, there would be many objections because it indicates support for a cause. I think that perhaps there are some comparisons that can be drawn here...
Mark
On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 03:42:55 +0100, Jens Ropers ropers@ropersonline.com wrote:
I. Christmas is the holiday previously known as Yule or Yuletide. It was a northern European seasonal festival since time immemorial. If (and only if) you consider Yuletide to have been a religious holiday, it was a NON-Christian religious holiday. But AFAIK Yuletide was a seasonal festival in the first instance -- only possibly with associated (non-Christian) religious connotations in the second instance.
II. Yuletide became known as Christmas thanks to the goody old three-E-method (of latter-day Microsoft fame): Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. The Christian church of the day was running a major conversion effort. They quickly found they couldn't beat old and cherished traditions such as Yuletide. So they accepted it as a legitimate festival into the church calendar, they added Christian symbolism and merged it with Christian ideology (most notably the holiday was "calculated"/defined to match Jesus of Nazareth's birth), and finally the entire festival got usurped and monopolized by Christianity. (Yuletide symbols/traditions such as Christmas trees and mistletoe still remain. Even Santa Claus is based on a Yuletide figure, I hear.)
Why am I telling you this?
Well, IMHO "Christmas" is in actuality a quite secular festival. It ''used to be such'' before those Christian missionaries came to northern Europe and ''it is again today''. Millions if not billions of non-Christians happily celebrate Christmas all over the world. Which leads to another point I'd like to make: IMHO "Christmas" (or "xmas") has become a GENERIC term and to many, many people all over the world "Christmas" simply denotes the festival around this time in the year (which again was previously known as Yuletide), and to many, many non-Christians it doesn't matter in the least that etymologically speaking the word "Christmas" carries with it that later added Christian connotation. For example millions of Japanese Shinto-Buddhists are quite happy to celebrate Christmas without wanting to become Christians. I too am quite happy to celebrate Christmas (and to call it "Christmas"), despite me being a budding polytheist whose religious beliefs and ethics are decidedly at odds with Christian ones.
And it's not just me to think so: Some French school recently found itself challenged (in protest) by pupils to remove a Christmas tree as a supposedly "conspicuous religious symbol". The tree was restored after it was officially ruled that Christmas trees are pagan symbols: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/05E40EA7-8A8C-486E-BF0E -8F257310AB5E.htm
IMHO braindead practices of avoiding to say "Merry Christmas" (spearheaded by corporate America, for fear of some dimwitted non-Christian suing) actually REINFORCE the mistaken perception of Christmas as a Christian holiday. ("Happy Holidays." Oh feck off.) I mean, I'm not trying to be a spoilsport to Christians here. If you're Christian and you consider Christmas a Christian holiday, well, fine by me. Just don't expect everybody else to agree.
For the above reasons, I believe any and all concerns over Gerard's very nice, harmless and well-intended "Merry Christmas and happy New Year"-project (http://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/Buon_Natale_e_felice_Anno_Nuovo%21) are totally unnecessary and inappropriate. Only someone ignorant of both the origins of Christmas and the extent to which Christmas is presently celebrated by followers of the majority of non-Christian religions of the world could have found fault with Gerard's idea. Thank you Gerard. :)
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year !!!
:-) :) :-D
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
_______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On 28 Dec 2004, at 04:12, Mark Williamson wrote:
Without commenting on my side on the issue, I think I should note that paganism is a religion as well, and thus symbols of paganism are religious symbols.
Yes and no.
The 1913 Webster defines "pagan" as follows:
Pagan \Pa"gan, a. [L. paganus of or pertaining to the country, pagan. See Pagan, n.] Of or pertaining to pagans; relating to the worship or the worshipers of false goods; heathen; idolatrous, as, pagan tribes or superstitions. [1913 Webster]
According to Princeton University's WordNet (2.0) however, the definition goes:
pagan adj : not acknowledging the God of Christianity and Judaism and Islam [syn: heathen, heathenish, ethnic] n : a person who does not acknowledge your God [syn: heathen, gentile, infidel]
So according to Webster's definition, a pagan festival (such as Yuletide) would indeed have been a religious one.
If you however follow the more contemporary WordNet, the word "pagan" does ''not'' necessarily say anything about whether or not a pagan festival and/or person is religious. It only says that the pagan does NOT acknowledge ''your'' God (ie./and/or the God of Judaism, Christianity or whatever).
I ''personally'' find that the Christmas of our present is a mostly secular holiday. (I'm going by how the majority of people in the world currently celebrate it.) Interpretations on the secular or religious status of Yuletide may differ. But then I didn't claim Yuletide to have been 100% secular. I wrote:
If (and only if) you consider Yuletide to have been a religious holiday, it was a NON-Christian religious holiday. But AFAIK Yuletide was a seasonal festival in the first instance -- only possibly with associated (non-Christian) religious connotations in the second instance.
To sum up: - One can argue about the religiousness of Yuletide. - One can argue about whether or not Christmas is a religious holiday today. (I think it's pretty secular, but that's only me.) - What's certain though is that Christmas was extensively celebrated as a Christian religious holiday for several centuries in between time. - It's also certain that Yuletide, the original Christmas, was not actually a Christian holiday.
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
Jens Ropers ha scritto:
I. Christmas is the holiday previously known as Yule or Yuletide. It was a northern European seasonal festival since time immemorial. If (and only if) you consider Yuletide to have been a religious holiday, it was a NON-Christian religious holiday. But AFAIK Yuletide was a seasonal festival in the first instance -- only possibly with associated (non-Christian) religious connotations in the second instance.
II. Yuletide became known as Christmas thanks to the goody old three-E-method (of latter-day Microsoft fame): Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. The Christian church of the day was running a major conversion effort. They quickly found they couldn't beat old and cherished traditions such as Yuletide. So they accepted it as a legitimate festival into the church calendar, they added Christian symbolism and merged it with Christian ideology (most notably the holiday was "calculated"/defined to match Jesus of Nazareth's birth), and finally the entire festival got usurped and monopolized by Christianity. (Yuletide symbols/traditions such as Christmas trees and mistletoe still remain. Even Santa Claus is based on a Yuletide figure, I hear.)
Hi,
I'm a little surprised, I knew that Christians moved the celebration of Jesus' birthday from January 6th to December 25th after the Constantine's edict by which the converted Emperor decided to unify Sol Invictus and Mithraic Sun cults of the time. with the Jesus' birthday. The fact that Christmas coincides with Yuletide is due to the fact that all over the world there were and still are Sun's rebirth (solstice) celebrations.
Am I wrong?
Even about Santa Claus I knew a different story (e.g.: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11063b.htm) :(
Can someone else give me more information?
Thanks and happy new year to all people following the gregorian calendar, Nino
PS I, an atheist (not a pagan), believe that Christmas remains a Christian celebration coinciding with a solstice.
http://www.vessella.it (italiano, esperanto, kiswahili, english) http://www.changamano.org (Iniziative di solidarietà per la Tanzania) http://www.lernado.it (Articoli di quotidiani della Tanzania, Corso di lingua swahili, Corso di lingua esperanto, Vocabolario esperanto-italiano, Jifunze lugha ya Kiesperanto, Kamusi ya Kiesperanto)
A very belated reply -- sorry about the delay.
On 29 Dec 2004, at 10:37, pinco wrote:
Jens Ropers ha scritto:
I. Christmas is the holiday previously known as Yule or Yuletide. It was a northern European seasonal festival since time immemorial. If (and only if) you consider Yuletide to have been a religious holiday, it was a NON-Christian religious holiday. But AFAIK Yuletide was a seasonal festival in the first instance -- only possibly with associated (non-Christian) religious connotations in the second instance.
II. Yuletide became known as Christmas thanks to the goody old three-E-method (of latter-day Microsoft fame): Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. The Christian church of the day was running a major conversion effort. They quickly found they couldn't beat old and cherished traditions such as Yuletide. So they accepted it as a legitimate festival into the church calendar, they added Christian symbolism and merged it with Christian ideology (most notably the holiday was "calculated"/defined to match Jesus of Nazareth's birth), and finally the entire festival got usurped and monopolized by Christianity. (Yuletide symbols/traditions such as Christmas trees and mistletoe still remain. Even Santa Claus is based on a Yuletide figure, I hear.)
Hi,
I'm a little surprised, I knew that Christians moved the celebration of Jesus' birthday from January 6th to December 25th after the Constantine's edict by which the converted Emperor decided to unify Sol Invictus and Mithraic Sun cults of the time. with the Jesus' birthday.
The fact that Christmas coincides with Yuletide is due to the fact that all over the world there were and still are Sun's rebirth (solstice) celebrations.
I guess you could also see it that way -- interpretations differ somewhat. However, regardless of whose Yuletide celebration Christendom adoped, it's pretty clear that "Christmas" was not originally a Christian celebration, and early Christians put more emphasis on Easter anyway (though even Christian Easter vs. various other pagan spring celebrations might be another can of worms).
There is lots of info on the origins of Christmas out there on the web, some of it conflicting. Google for Christmas and origins (or Yuletide or Pagan or similar). These guys: http://www.holidayorigins.com/html/christmas.html for instance think it was the Romans that gave the Christian church Christmas, and that this would have predated the compromise with/assimilation of pagan Yule. This might match the info you quoted above. Again, the one thing where most halfway thorough sources seem to agree is that the origins of Christmas as we know it are not really Christian.
Am I wrong?
Even about Santa Claus I knew a different story (e.g.: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11063b.htm) :(
In Germany, there are actually TWO "purveyors of gifts": Sankt Nikolaus (aka Der Nikolaus) and Knecht Ruprecht (aka Der Weihnachtsmann). The German "Nikolaustag" (St. Nicholas day) is December 6th, and kids get ''smaller'' gifts there. Christmas proper is celebrated on Christmas' Eve in Germany and that's where people get the big gifts. There definitely is some overlap between both customs and they probably more or less got back to a single origin. US Christmas gift giving custom actually is similar to Germans gift giving customs on "Nikolaustag", but really as far as Germans are concerned, Knecht Ruprecht/Der Weihnachtsmann is Santa Claus and der Nikolaus is another person.
Can someone else give me more information?
Thanks and happy new year to all people following the gregorian calendar, Nino PS I, an atheist (not a pagan), believe that Christmas remains a Christian celebration coinciding with a solstice.
http://www.vessella.it (italiano, esperanto, kiswahili, english) http://www.changamano.org (Iniziative di solidarietà per la Tanzania) http://www.lernado.it (Articoli di quotidiani della Tanzania, Corso di lingua swahili, Corso di lingua esperanto, Vocabolario esperanto-italiano, Jifunze lugha ya Kiesperanto, Kamusi ya Kiesperanto)
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org