Look out, Santa! Chocolate-wielding Germans target Xmas hero

AFP / Google ^ | 12/20/2008

[Alex Murphy]

BERLIN (AFP) — Santa beware! Activists in Germany are waging an international campaign to do away with old Father Christmas and say they are gaining ground thanks to the global economic meltdown.

Armed with child-friendly stickers, web-savvy promoters and chocolate figurines, the "Santa-Free Zone" movement says it is gathering steam this year against what it calls the hollow commercialisation of Christmas.

Launched by a German Catholic priest in 2002, the campaign aims to knock Santa off his pedestal and replace what they see as a cheap, American import with the real thing: Saint Nicholas.

"The movement is intended to raise awareness of the fact that the consumption-oriented Santa launched by the Christmas gift industry has very little to do with the holy bishop Saint Nicholas," said Christoph Schommer of the Catholic aid group Bonifatiuswerk, which is rallying the Santa opposition.

Saint Nicholas, an actual historical figure, was in the fourth century Bishop of Myra in today's Turkey whose legendary modesty and generosity led him to give gifts in secret.

As the story goes, his greatest miracle was saving three girls whose impoverished father wanted to sell them into prostitution. Nicholas, who had inherited a fortune from his father, left three lumps of gold over three nights in their room while they were sleeping.

Catholics and Orthodox Christians in much of the world still celebrate Saint Nicholas Day, usually on December 6, as a festival for children, who receive chocolates in their shoes when they leave them out overnight.

But Saint Nicholas has long been upstaged during the holiday season by the ho-ho-ho-ing Santa Claus, or Father Christmas in Britain and Canada, and activists would like the saint to reclaim the Yuletide throne.

Santa's red fur-lined suit, chubby mid-section and fluffy white beard are all thought to be inventions of

[dangus]

>> It’s a common misperception that the Sphinx didn’t exist during the Ice Age. <<

If you believe Roland Emmerich movies. But then again, you face the problem of cavemen or space aliens.

>> BTW, the argument is that there are sphinx-like statues all over the place <<

yes...

>> and they are painted red, white, or red & white to stand for upper and lower Egypt. <<

... no.

>> I did not say the Sphinx head was painted red ~ but that it had red stripes. <<

Which is (1) false, (2) unlike the mushroom in question.

>> Amanita has most of its red dots in a band anyway. <<

Not in any pictures I’ve ever seen... although they sorta can clump up around the bottom forming a band.

>> Regarding dating, the Sahara was in a pluvial right up to the beginning of Egyptian civilization in upper Egypt. <<

Egypt is where it is because of the Nile River. Prior to he rest of the region drying up, there’s little reason for such a concentration of people as to create such massive works.

>> On the other hand, it was a source of dope and all it took was one guy who’d been to the Alps or other mountains in Europe, and he’d know what it looked like. <<

By that logic, all you’d need is anybody to go anywhere and anything can be proven to be anything else.

[muawiyah]

You do know that several millenia later Egyptian mummies began showing up with cocaine in the body's cells.

Now where'd they find that stuff?

BTW, you are not responding well to the statements ~ for example, an Egyptian visiting the Swiss/Italian Alps at that period of time (the time the Sphinx was delineated into a lion) would not be out of hand.

[dangus]

No, the notion of one wanderer reaching the Swiss Alps isn’t too bizarre at all. The notion of an entire civilization pouring their creative energies into reproducing something only he had seen... that’s what’s far fetched. And your notion that it could be true, therefore it is true is what I’m criticizing. You’ve strung together an immesibly long cascade of immensely improbably things to support your argument of what you say did happen. Not everything with a pinched neck (”sphinctus”) is a mushroom.

[muawiyah]

I am sure the Egyptians understood the general nature of the shape of a mushroom.

Now, regarding what may have been the original and far smaller focus of interest at the site of what is now the Sphinx, that would have been there all through the Ice Age for 80,000 years before the Egyptian civilization grew up.

These are called Sandstone Pillars.  They are in the Sahara somewhere.  I particularly like the morel shape of the first one in the line, and if you look up to the right you see a couple more with "heads" typical of a mushroom fruiting body.

Most likely any such forms along the Nile Valley would have early on been identified as objects of veneration by the hunter/gatherers who traveled there for TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS.

 

[muawiyah]

The tourism company that takes you past these honeys in Egypt's Western Desert calls them "sandstone mushrooms" in fact.  Definitely something to attract both neolithic, new neolithic, and maybe even paleolithic and modern interest.

 

(People pay good money to see these things and you doubt they existed? I'm more concerned with why the Egyptians decided to quarry away the stone UNDER one of them.)

[dangus]

Yes, but those aren’t sphinxes.

[muawiyah]

Give me some wooden wedges and some copper chisels and they can be anything you want.

As it is the original stoney body, at the then surface level, was simply finished into its present form. The lower body of the Sphinx was cut out of the rock. They quarried around the original rock and built a temple nearby.

There are some drawings of the whole enterprise that give you some idea of the different levels involved and the scale of the structure.

[Father Santa Claus]

Alex Murphy: Please Forward to Christoph Schommer:
My legal name is Santa Claus, and I am a Christian Monk and ordained Priest who volunteers as a full-time advocate for children who are abused, neglected, exploited, abandoned, homeless, and institutionalized through no fault of their own. I believe that Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Christ, not the crass, commercial, secular spectacle it has become in many places, and that the greatest gift one can give is love, not presents. Shame on you for belittling Santa’s generous and loving spirit. Santa Claus (SantasLink dot net)

[Alex Murphy]

My legal name is Santa Claus, and I am a Christian Monk and ordained Priest who volunteers as a full-time advocate for children who are abused, neglected, exploited, abandoned, homeless, and institutionalized through no fault of their own. I believe that Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Christ, not the crass, commercial, secular spectacle it has become in many places, and that the greatest gift one can give is love, not presents. Shame on you for belittling Santa’s generous and loving spirit. Santa Claus (SantasLink dot net)

Ah yes, I indeed remember you. As I recall, you're a monk in the Order of the Anam Cara, which is under the Apostles' Anglican Church. How is the AAC different/distinct from the United Catholic Church? The Order's website makes reference to both, but doesn't explain the relationship between the two.

[Cronos]

When England and Spain expelled their Jews around the 13th century, they were welcomed in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Jews also came from the erstwhile Khazar kingdom, and they thrived in the commonwealth so much that they were one-tenth of the population of Poland before WWII. Most of the Jews of the world lived in Central and Eastern Europe, thank you and over the centuries if you compare what happened to them there as compared to Western Europe, it was lot better out east.

[Cronos]

The Sumerians are most likely related to the Elamites and Dravidians and Indo-Harappans rather than Sa’ami. They also called their lands Sa-giga or the land of the black headed (haired) people.

[Cronos]

As dangus points out, the modern images around Santa Claus are various world traditions all mixed up together in that melting pot called the USA. They didn’t exist in concert prior to the US pot — like dangus pointed out flyign raindeer being an amalgamation of Mediterranean ideas of Santa riding a flying horse (Pegasus) and Nothern European ideas of Santa in a sled (needed in winter) being driven by, yes, winter animals — reindeer.

[muawiyah]

FLying Reindeer ~ they've always been imagined to fly ~ particularly after they consume sufficient quantities of amanita muscaria. After all, human beings report a sensation of "flying" when they use that particular psychoactive mushroom.

Sa'ami ride reindeer.

There's a misunderstanding of what's going on here with the man/reindeer interface ~ the blanket ~ these creatures go about 65 MPH. That's what keeps them ahead of the wolves ~ but not the men. Wolves only go 35 MPH. Men tag along with a tame reindeer, or on a sled, or on a ski. Or, they simply ski down the hills at a reindeer herd, catch up with them, and grab a reindeer on the fly.

The point is that men can match or exceed the reindeers average flight travel speed. Wolves can't. Given enough time men kill off all the old, lame and very young reindeer in any herd leaving the wolves nothing to eat. They die out and hunting becomes easier.

These days all the herds of use to men are captive. In Scandinavia it is common for reindeer to be loaded in trucks and driven to pasture.

Regarding the Sa'ami linguistic relationship to Sumerian, about 7500 years ago the Eastern Sa'ami encountered a different group of humans ~ with whom they mixed. This is reflected in the proportions of various haplogroups in the modern populations. That is KOINKYDINKILY just about the same time the Pictoglyphs turned up in the Kola Peninsula (now shared by Finland and Russia). So who were these strangers?

Fur shur they weren't Finns or Latvians ~ not at that time.

Not far behind that event the Sa'ami X-factor DNA sequence turned up in the Sakha/Yakut people in Siberia. That's about when the reindeer were first domesticated, and by these very same people ~ my thought is a comely young lady was swapped for one of those reindeer, although "other" exchanges were possible.

Concerning the Sa'ami language and it's relationship to ancient Sumerian and Dravidian, we must first remember we are dealing with what seem to be a linguistic isolate, and not the later Semitic language that replaced Sumerian. Once Elamite is demonstrated to be an Afro-Asiatic language we can lay that idea to rest

At the same time Hungarian, still spoken, is a creole with several major elements threaded through it. Many of the earliest Sumerian language scholars were Hungarian, and it was their impression that many of their successes in cracking the Sumerian code was because much of the base of modern Hungarian was a Sumerian cognate that had been spoken earlier around or near the Carpathian mountains. WWII and Communism put a stop to that research, but it has recently been restarted.

It is possible to find references to "a Sa'ami" language which was spoken up in the Carpathians by some people right up until the mountains were cleared by the Czar's Cossacks (in the early 1800s). Did those folks always live there or were they Scandinavian gold and silver miners who came to the Carpathians during Sweden's short conquest of Poland-Lithuania? Turns out no one knows.

Until enough research is done (folding palms of hands to gether and bring them up in the lotus position in front of the face) "All Things Are Possy Bell".

[muawiyah]

The Jews were expelled by Spain in 1492 ~ amazingly the same year Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean.

1492 is nearly the 16th century.

Jewish residency in Spain dates from an early time ~ pre-Christian in fact ~ goes WAY WAY WAY back.

The community in Alexandria Egypt lasted far longer than the community in Babylon, and both .

England didn't expel any Jews until they had some to expel. 1066 seems to have been a good year for enough Jews to arrive for anyone to notice them. At the same time having "special status" they were subject to arbitrary royal decisions every time England changed kings. There was a 1300 expulsion, then they were allowed in by the mid 1600s. I don't think there's been any significant expulsions from England since that time.

Most reputable analysts agree that as much as 25% of the modern Spanish population is genetically identical to the Medieval Jewish population in Spain anyway which means, of course, all the Jews didn't leave! You find something similar in the United States where upwards of 10% of the population are of some/to/substantial Jewish background! (It's a "founder effect" pedating the great migrations of the late 1800s).

[Cronos]

The majority of Jews in the world prior to WWII lived in Central and Eastern Europe — there were even Jewish towns and villages. The C and E europeans were no more anti-semitic than the westerners.

[Cronos]

It is possible to find references to "a Sa'ami" language which was spoken up in the Carpathians by some people right up until the mountains were cleared by the Czar's Cossacks (in the early 1800s).

Not really -- there are no traces of this. The languages in the Carpathians were Indo-European -- the Sa'ami related languages never reached that far south. Do you have any links to the contrary?

[Cronos]

ok, I take the above back -- yes, related languages like Magyar could be found as the Magyar went ahunting to Hungary



These are Sami by the way.

Their features look more mongoloid rather than caucasian

[muawiyah]

Well, sure the Carpathian Mountain languages were Indo-European except where they were HUNGARIAN and a variety of others ~ and then the CZAR took ownership of the territory and evicted all the people ~ well, he said he "evicted" them. Probably killed them. Indo-Europeans, who became known as the Carpatho-Rhaetians moved in (except they were mostly Cossack and only barely Indo-European).

That was part of the Swedish defeat at the hands of the Russians ~ it resulted in the removal of the Swedes from the Continent and from Finland in 1810!

Now, what was it you were saying about the Carpathians? Didn't you know the Swedes had effective control of the region for quite some time and actually moved people in, out, around and about the Swedish Empire ~ although unaccountably they didn't turn the Poles into Lutherans.

[muawiyah]

No, Cronos, the Sa'ami features are hardly "Mongolian looking". They are more like our mutual Cro-Magnon ancestors. The Sa'ami have retained the face while the people to the South of them have been Africanized and mutated.

It was a long, cold, hard 15,000 years of separation!

[muawiyah]

Sure they are ~