No poinsettias for us this Christmas.NO need to deprive yourself of a lovely plant. Just check out your local nursery and ask the grower if he grew them from seed or got tiny plants from somewhere else, THEN you could ask if this family supplied them.
oh, the irony of it all.
http://www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/poinsettia/history.html
Poinsettia's are from Mexico, they are red for a period of time, Montezuma the Aztec king, used poinsettias for medicinal purposes and was a ruthless killer who shed blood (red) while sacrificing humans to his gods. The plant was introduced to the USA by ambassador Poinnsett and now the plant is associated with Christmas because of this story.
http://www.ecke.com/html/h_corp/corp_legend.html
Montezuma, the last of the Aztec kings, would have poinsettias brought into what now is Mexico City by caravans because poinsettias could not be grown in the high altitude.
Montezuma was a conquering king, who frequently waged war against his neighbors in a pretty successful effort to expand his empire. He kept the gods on his side with a regular regimen of human sacrifice. While the Aztecs had a long history of ritualistic human sacrifice, the art had never known a patron like Montezuma.
At the time, such sacrifices were performed with ritual daggers atop the Aztec pyramids. Montezuma sacrificed tens of thousands of prisoners at a time.
A 1590 account detailed the procedure: "The usual method of sacrifice was to open the victim's chest, pull out his heart while he was still alive, and then knock the man down, rolling him down the temple steps, which were awash with blood."
Apparently the gods were appreciative of all this bloodshed, because Montezuma apparently had a pretty good run, annexing several nearby kingdoms and allegedly running a virtual police state with an iron fist.
95 posted on
11/10/2006 2:24:59 PM PST by
Coleus
(Roe v. Wade and Endangered Species Act both passed in 1973, Murder Babies/save trees, geese, algae)