Page 58 - Autumn Brilliance - We Wish You A Scary Christmas! Winter 2020

The Dark Season
Exploring Olde World Traditions
What we blithely take for granted and celebrate now for Christmas has, in fact, ancient and very heathen roots, going back possibly thousands of years in time.
For many of us having grown up in the 20th century, the accepted generic version of Christmas includes a rotund, jolly Santa Claus clad in red and white, expediting a pristine sleigh carried across the wintry sky by a slew of magical flying reindeer (one of which was inflicted with a glow in the dark proboscis). This image has permeated our society each holiday season, on television, in movies, and on the radio and billboards everywhere, becoming ineradicably saturated in our minds.
(You can thank the folks at a certain soft drink company for this, it being one of the most successful advertising campaigns in modern history.)
Oh, but the world we live in is a very big place, my dears, full of wonderfully divergent cultures and beliefs that often step far away from the crass commercialism that our modern-day Christmas can sometimes be.
For those who are eager to step outside the safety of their domicile, and learn some interesting tidbits about the Yule season abroad, many amazing discoveries await.
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