[muawiyah]

No, when it's the shortest day of the year you are not celebrating an old time Mesopotamian diety ~ you are worshipping a FAR MORE ANCIENT diety ~ but within 5 days time you will find Little Red Man, in his guise as a shaman with a bag, coming to your lavu and climbing down the fire/smoke hole at the top ~ he will leave burned coals or things of utility like baskets or dolls for the children.

Leastwise that's what the white folks do ~ the Middle Easterners may do something else.

It's like the Spring festival where everybody eats eggs taken from the recently arrived birds from the South. What a relief from dried fish and dried reindeer meat.

Later on, when the great herds return to their winter quarters, Herb Woman will appear bringing you every sort of seed and fruit (that the subarctic regions can provide).

Your women will focus on the four household goddesses ~ who have names so similar to those of the Dravidian people it's uncanny.

Jesus wasn't inserted into the old time religion in that region until the 1500s, so he's a somewhat late arrival to those folks ~

[Lazamataz]

I knew this had to be your post before I saw the name.

It was just so WEIRD.

[Cronos]

who have names so similar to those of the Dravidian people it's uncanny.

you mean names like Venkatanarasimharajuvaripeta or Srinivasa Chakraborthy Tiruvaneleshwaramparameshwara Aiyar?