I felt you might want to know this.  I hope you had an enjoyable Christmas.
I wish you all a Happy New year and holidays.

Iyi Eweka


From: "NOWAMAGBE  OMOIGUI" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2001 23:10:28 -0500
Subject: [Edo-Nation] c.6. BC  CHRIST IS BORN?

c.6. BC  CHRIST IS BORN?

Although most Christians celebrate December 25 as the birthday of Jesus
Christ, few in the first two Christian centuries claimed any knowledge of
the exact day or year in which he was born. The oldest existing record of a
Christmas celebration is found in a Roman almanac that tells of a Christ's
Nativity festival led by the church of Rome in 336 A.D. The precise reason
why Christmas came to be celebrated on December 25 remains obscure, but most
researchers believe that Christmas originated as a Christian substitute for
pagan celebrations of the winter solstice.

To early Christians (and to many Christians today), the most important
holiday on the Christian calendar was Easter, which commemorates the death
and resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, as Christianity began to take
hold in the Roman world, in the early fourth century, church leaders had to
contend with a popular Roman pagan holiday commemorating the "birthday of
the unconquered sun" (natalis solis invicti)--the Roman name for the winter
solstice.

Every winter, Romans honored the pagan god Saturn, the god of agriculture,
with a festival that began on December 17 and usually ended on or around
December 25 with a winter-solstice celebration in honor of the beginning of
the new solar cycle. This festival was a time of merrymaking, and families
and friends would exchange gifts. At the same time, Mithraism--worship of
the ancient Persian god of light--was popular in the Roman army, and the
cult held some of its most important rituals on the winter solstice.

After the Roman Emperor Constantine I converted to Christianity in 312 and
sanctioned Christianity, church leaders made efforts to appropriate the
winter-solstice holidays and thereby achieve a more seamless conversion to
Christianity for the emperor's subjects. In rationalizing the celebration of
Jesus' birthday in late December, church leaders may have argued that since
the world was allegedly created on the spring equinox (late March), so too
would Jesus have been conceived by God on that date. The Virgin Mary,
pregnant with the son of God, would hence have given birth to Jesus nine
months later on the winter solstice.

From Rome, the Christ's Nativity celebration spread to other Christian
churches to the west and east, and soon most Christians were celebrating
Christ's birth on December 25. To the Roman celebration was later added
other winter-solstice rituals observed by various pagan groups, such as the
lighting of the Yule log and decorations with evergreens by Germanic tribes.
The word Christmas entered the English language originally as Christes
maesse, meaning "Christ's mass" or "festival of Christ" in Old English. A
popular medieval feast was that of St. Nicholas of Myra, a saint said to
visit children with gifts and admonitions just before Christmas. This story
evolved into the modern practice of leaving gifts for children said to be
brought by "Santa Claus," a derivative of the Dutch name for St.
Nicholas--Sinterklaas.

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