Welcome Yule!

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!

.................................................

All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

© Susan Cooper, part of every Revels show since their inception.  For John and his family.

on Irving Berlin's Holidays...

From the 'Post:

The success of "White Christmas" paved the way for a whole new genre of Christmas songs. Two years after Berlin's ballad first appeared in Paramount's "Holiday Inn," MGM filmed "Meet Me in St. Louis," which had as its musical centerpiece the bittersweet "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" -- a song about loved ones trying to stay together "if the fates allow." (A film ahead of its time, "Meet Me in St. Louis" is about a family resisting corporate relocation.) Two years later came "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire"), and a year after that, "Let It Snow." By then the American Christmas song was about staying warm in winter, about staying connected to loved ones and traditions. It also practiced separation of church and song. [...] Many of those Christmas songwriters, of course, were Jewish and the children of immigrants; their deepest drive was to demonstrate beyond all doubt that they were assimilated, cosmopolitan, American.

[...]

White Christmas" was one of a dozen numbers that Berlin wrote for "Holiday Inn," each song commemorating a specific holiday. One hesitates to impute anything so vulgar as a message to a Crosby-Fred Astaire musical, but the message of this musical is that we are all Americans and these are our holidays. Easter belongs to all of us, even if it is about little more than strolling down Fifth Avenue. Christmas belongs to all of us. The religious content of those holidays was fine for Christian believers, but the composer of "God Bless America" preferred to celebrate a common national identity, complete with common holidays that had nonsectarian meanings. Berlin kept Christmas in the public square and, more than anyone before or since, sent it out over the public airwaves. But it was an American, not a Christian, Christmas. [...] Now the Fox News demagogues want to impose a more sectarian Christmas on us, supplanting the distinctly American holiday we have celebrated lo these threescore years with a holiday that divides us along religious lines. Bill O'Reilly can blaspheme all he wants, but like millions of my countrymen, I take attacks on Irving Berlin's America personally.

The bad theology of ID worsens...

From Panda's Thumb: in National Review Online, Prof Lee Strang "concludes with advice on how future school boards can more effectively break the law:

we can encourage our school boards to be circumspect if they decide to include a discussion of intelligent design in the science classroom. Instead of presenting overtly religious arguments for intelligent design, present the strong—explicitly scientific—claims put forward by intelligent-design proponents such as the Discovery Institute.... Then...federal judges will have a more difficult time declaring teaching intelligent design unconstitutional.

Yes; if you improve the quality of your counterfeiting, it will be harder to detect you. Note that Strang is not suggesting that people amend the Constitution—which would be the honorable thing to do. No, he’s giving advice on how to violate it more effectively.

Worse than that, even, Strang is advocating that Christian people deny their Lord. Rather than openly acknowledge one’s religious motivation and religious beliefs, he counsels his readers to pretend not to be Christians, to foreswear their savior, and to bear false witness that they’re really just doing a secular thing. Perhaps, at this festive season of the year, it would be well to remind the good professor of Matthew 10:32-33: “Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.”"

The Balance of Nature?

You know, i would guess that the vast majority of religious-right side don't actually know where the fish came from in the first place, as a Christian symbol.