[rollei_list] Happy Winter Solistice!

Have you folks noticed how much longer the days are getting to be in the Northern Hemisphere and how much shorter in the Southern! Oh, my!
This is a season for reflection and remembrance for the year now ending, a time of celebration to mark the new year coming into play. Almost every culture in the North temperate and arctic zones has developed some ritual of celebration to mark the "return of the sun". Our European traditions are centered around the Yule festival developed in the agricultural Germanic cultures -- the pastoral Celts celebrated their equivalent at Candlemas in February, a Cross-Quarter Day. Christianity early adopted this and reworked the Yule Festival into Christmas, effectively shifting the probable birthday of Jesus -- almost certainly in March, as there are no little lowing lambs floating about in Palestine in December!
Hannukkah, the Jewish festival, is more interesting. There is a rich Talmudic lore on the ritual, but the two books describing its origins, 1 and 2 Maccabees, are no longer in the Jewish Bible, though they were included at the time the Library at Alexandria translated the Jewish Bible into Patristic Greek, the Septuagint ("the Seventy", as it supposedly took seventy scholars seventy days and seventy nights to complete the project). The Jews at some point around the time of Christ reduced the canon of their Bible into the modern Tanakh, and the two Maccadbee works were dropped for reasons unknown. The Christian Fathers, however, in adopting the canonical text of the Bible at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD did include all of the books of the Septuagint in the Old Testament. (Several of the Fathers stated that they had seen Hebrew texts for both books but such have not survived into modern times, so the only textual tradition is from the Greek Septuagint.) The full Nicaean canon remains the Bible used by the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches though, during the Reformation, the Protestants set several books aside from the canon of the Bible, forming these into the Apocrypha, which are deemed to have great worth as instructional and historical documents but are not regarded as having the full force of the Word of God. Bear in mind that the radical Protestants who produced the Authorized Version of the Bible (inaccurately known today as "the King James Version": James only convoked the assembly which created this to keep the turbulent and troublesome radicals form street-preaching and the like) included the Apocrypha in their translation though these are now generally dropped from many editions of the AV.
So, in the end, Hannukkah is a major festival but its origins can no longer be found in the Bible as used in the Jewish faith though these can be found included in some form in Christian churches.
This is a grand time of year whatever its meanings. It is the season of the winter lights, the shortest days of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, a time for beach parties, I gather, in the Southern.
However you celebrate it, have a grand Yule and remember that photo opportunities abound!
As Tiny Tim puts it so succinctly in A CHRISTMAS CAROL, "God Bless Us, Every One!" 

Marc James Small
Rollei List Owner


msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!

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