The Amazing History of Christmas

How much do you know about Christmas – about its origins and its many beloved traditions? Do you know where the idea of stocking-stuffers comes from? Or how lights found their way onto the Christmas tree? Or why we all have the jolly, red-suited, white-haired image of Santa Claus in our heads? In this video, historian William Federer explores the holiday’s rich and unique history.

  • “This is a full-blown, four-alarm holiday emergency here. We’re gonna press on, and we’re gonna have the hap, hap, happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap-danced with Danny fucking Kaye. And when Santa squeezes his fat white ass down that chimney tonight, he’s gonna find the jolliest bunch of assholes this side of the nuthouse.” — Clark W. Griswold Jr.

Is The Christmas Tree A Pagan Symbol?

(Video Description from YT Channel) Bobby unpacks the history of the Christmas Tree and whether it has pagan roots or not.

To begin this two part series we are looking at if the Bible forbids Christmas or Christmas customs.

This video looks at the history of Christmas and argues there is no evidence it comes from paganism.

(Video Description from YT Channel) Is Christmas pagan? Many Christians celebrate the birth of Christ on December 25, even though Jesus was almost certainly not born on December 25. Since pagan groups in the ancient world had celebrations that coincided with the Christian celebration of the birth of Christ, are Christians who celebrate Christmas today engaging in pagan activities? In this video, Marie Wood discusses the issue. Merry Christmas!

(Video Description from YT Channel) In this video I discuss the origin of the Christmas tree. Some think it’s condemned by the Bible, in Jeremiah 10:3-5. Others think it’s a Pagan idol. There were Pagan cultures that kept tree branches in their homes during the Winter Solstice, including the Egyptians, Druids, Romans (who also celebrated Saturnalia) and Vikings around the time of Christmas. Martin Luther kept a Christmas tree in his home. The Germans brought it to America. Americans at first protested against it, but if afterwards became popular. [Editor’s Note: A decent channel, but do not agree with all his presentations – to be clear]

The above were short presentations… below is an excellent, more in-depth interview detailing Greek Myths and other topics:

  • Is Christmas pagan? Was Christianity based on pagan celebrations on December 25? In this interview, I talk with Dr. Louis Markos, expert on Greek and Roman mythology.

See Dr. Markos’ book: The Myth Made Fact: Reading Greek and Roman Mythology through Christian Eyes

A Historian Explains the Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus

In this interview, historian and philosopher Dr. Gary Habermas explains the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus. We also talk about NDE’s (Near Death Experiences) and the Shroud of Turin. “The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus” These two books are excellent studies of the issues:

Make It A #BlackXmas

Michael Medved interviews Dr. Melina Abdullah, a professor at California State University-Los Angeles (CSU-LA) who is also a national Black Lives Matter (BLM) leader. Her racism is very apparent in this interview. She is a converted Muslim, is a Marxist, and really, an anti-American.

THE DAILY WIRE has more:

….Abdullah, who descends from a family of Marxist organizers, made the comments on her weekly KPFK radio show called “Beautiful Struggle,” which features songs like “5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO” as bumper music. She was joined by Dr. Anthony Ratcliff, also a professor at CSU-LA, who organized BLM’s first youth activist camp last summer.

“Black Lives Matter and other organizations build a strong critique and understanding of racism and white supremacy and sexism and homophobia, transphobia, but we have to have as much hatred or vitriol against capitalism,” Ratcliff said. “Until we start to see capitalism just as nefarious as white supremacy, we will always be struggling.”

BLM launched a Black Xmas website on Saturday which calls for “no spending with White corporations” through New Year’s Day, encouraging supporters to donate to allied, black-led community groups or black-owned businesses instead…..


UPDATED w/2-COMMENTS


Two comments from my LIVELEAK I thought worth sharing:

I am white just for the record.

I agree with a lot she said.

Blacks should invest in their own neighborhoods.

I’ve always found it strange that the local 7/11 is run by an Asian in most black neighborhoods.

Her condemnation of Wal-Mart is a little under informed.

From district managers, store managers, assistant managers department managers people of color are very common.

Some guy waving around a realistic looking pellet gun got shot.

You don’t blame the gun you blame the man with the gun.

If you walk into a New York trading company and don’t see a lot of black faces that’s discrimination.

If you walk into an NFL locker room and don’t see a lot of white faces that’s talent.

Double standard double standard double standard.

The black community needs leadership, encouragement, and talent.

It doesn’t need blame the white guy. If they’d get over that I can get on with it.

Here is a “here-here” of sorts:

Well said. It’s not like there aren’t examples from the past…Harlem at its height was not a ghetto, and Greenwood in Tulsa Oklahoma was known as “Wallstreet” before whites burned it down in 1921. It was the wealthiest black community in the US. I’m sure black multimillionaire sport stars and celebrities give tons to colleges and universities for black scholarships, but I never hear of them giving money to start up grocery stores or pharmacies or 7/11’s in black communities.

Google CELEBRATES Anti-Human and Anti-Christian Motifs

I am updating this post by adding to it by way of older posts AS WELL AS this new example of Google’s morbid honoring of an Islamo-Fascist/Marxist leaning radical, Yuri Kochiyama:

Many of you may not know who this is. Trust me, until I started writing on the Five-Percenters, I didn’t know either. Truth Revolt catches up the uninitiated to the violent culture of the left:

Truth Revolt

  • I consider Osama bin Laden as one of the people that I admire. To me, he is in the category of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, all leaders that I admire,” said activist Yuri Kochiyama in 2003. 

Kochiyama has just been given the honor of having her 95th birthday celebrated with a colorful Google Doodle that attempts to paint her as a great advocate for equality on par with Martin Luther King Jr. 

If the above quote alone wasn’t enough to disqualify her from the list of many other Americans who deserve a Google Doodle in their honor, Kochiyama also “admired Mao; supported the black separatist movement; demanded the release of four Puerto Rican nationalists who opened fire in the House of Representatives in a terror attack; worked on behalf of cop killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur,” according to Jim Lakely ofHeartland.

Lakely did not have to look very far (nor did TruthRevolt) to discover all this troubling information on Kochiyama, because a mere click on the Google Doodle itself leads to the Wikipedia page that lays it out alongside her work as a “human rights” activists, the same place where her opinions of Osama bin Laden after 9/11 were labeled merely “controversial.”

At a time when Facebook is being exposed for its suppression of conservative users and ideas on the social media platform, it’s great to see that there’s no leftist bias at Google as well.

Kochiyama also converted to Islam later in life….

You know who else admires Mao? Rachel Maddow… but that is neither here-nor-there, as, those that watch her on MSNBC do not grasp reality anyway. I make this point of “reality in a conversation with a commentator on one of my recent uploads to my YouTube Channel about the Left. Here is the opening comment followed by my response:

Tim said: I have been following the debate and, as a European, I have to say it sends shivers down my spine. If the state can decide what ever it wants, it will…

I respond: …And, if people believe the “States” new definitions/reality (like government can control weather or legislation does away with nature’s “male/female” distinctions), they are [or can be] convinced of anything… violence being the lesser of the reality we experience. “Lesser” in that natural law (whether you think the gender distinction is God given or millions of years of the struggle of species through evolution) is more a law that CANNOT be changed… but is. People who are convinced that they can change THIS are easily convinced [in my opinion] of violent ends to their conviction. This is natural to man’s nature… and so these people scare me. And we have seen this happen in the past — either people convinced to do violence or people convinced to ignore it for the greater purpose.

Sorry for the rant, you got me thinking.

Tim finishes: Never apologize for thinking! Ever :) I live in Belgium which is a social democraty with a mighty state, cruddy economy and backwards infrastructure. Needless to inform you about the terrible state my country is in… I Always considered the USA as a beacon of light, good idea, success and individualism. I share your opinion….

These people and support for radicalism in all walks of life scare me. Not in my soul… I am saved and a child of God, but scares me for the future of our country which has been a blessing for soo many. Here are PolitiChicks input on this Yuri Kochiyama flap:

PolitiChicks

My default search engine is Google and I use it quite often. I am aware of the Google higher ups and their political leanings and I disagree with them but I’m not usually a boycott person. Honestly, if I boycott everything I disagree with then I will live in a closet with nothing to eat or look at for the rest of my life.

Recently, however, the Google Doodle kept flashing at me every time I opened the browser. Eventually I clicked on the dumb thing, though I rarely do…

[….]

…Clicking on the image I see this at the very top of the page:

“Yuri Kochiyama (河内山 百合 Kōchiyama Yuri, May 19, 1921 – June 1, 2014) was a Japanese American human rights activist. She is notable as one of the few prominent non-black black separatists. Influenced by Marxism, Maoism, and the thoughts of Malcolm X, she was an advocate for many revolutionary movements.”

“Influenced by Marxism, Maoism and the thoughts of Malcom X…”  Interesting that Google would choose to put a Doodle up celebrating someone who admired murderers and thugs.

I don’t care if she was advocating for “equality,” the fact is, if you are influenced by communist dictators your idea of “equality” is obviously not the kind of equality Webster’s Dictionary defines….

Daily Caller

…[Google’s] short summary substantially whitewashes Kochiyama’s career, though. Besides campaigning for reparations to interned Japanese-Americans (which were granted in 1988), Kochiyama’s career included frequent support for Communist revolution, black separatism, and anti-American terrorism.

A convert to Islam, after 9/11 Kochiyama was deeply critical of the U.S. war on terrorism and offered strong praise for Osama bin Laden. In a 2003 interview, she described bin Laden as a leader she admired, alongside Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, and Che Guevara.

“I thank Islam for bin Laden,” she said. “America’s greed, aggressiveness, and self-righteous arrogance must be stopped.” She argued that America’s goal in the war on terrorism was “taking over the world.”

Bin Laden wasn’t the only violent terrorist Kochiyama had sympathy for. She also declared she “completely support[ed]” the Shining Path in Peru, a violent Maoist insurgency implicated in numerous terrorist actions and atrocities. She participated in an occupation of the Statue of Liberty in 1977 that called for the release of four Puerto Rican terrorists who shot up the House of Representatives in the 1950s. She also solicited support for figures like Yu Kikumura, a member of the Japanese Red Army who was convicted in 1988 of planning to bomb a U.S. Navy recruitment office, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Black Panther who was convicted of murdering a Philadelphia policeman in 1981.

Besides her sympathy for armed revolutionaries and terrorists, Kochiyama also advocated black separatism, an ideology that seeks the creation of a separate black homeland in the United States. Towards that end, she was one of the few non-black individuals to join the Republic of New Afrika, a seditious group that claimed dominion over five states in the American South.

WOW!

Needless to say I stopped using Google for most of my searches years ago. I support Bing with as much bandwidth as I can. Here are some previous posts I have on the issue… “enjoy”


E A S T E R


First I want to note the “Easter Example” of choices between Bing and Google. Google first followed by Bing:

Here is the posted “doodle” [art] on Easter by Google:

Now, here is Bing’s Easter display:

This erupted into a an issue on the WWW… here are a few examples:

InstaPundit

…The timing is oddly appropriate; as Dennis Prager has written, “You cannot understand the Left if you do not understand that leftism is a religion,” and one with its own sources of mythology. Back in 2006 at Tech Central Station, Lee Harris described French Marxist Georges Sorel (1847-1922), and the concept of the Sorelian Myth:

Sorel, for whom religion was important, drew a comparison between the Christian and the socialist revolutionary. The Christian’s life is transformed because he accepts the myth that Christ will one day return and usher in the end of time; the revolutionary socialist’s life is transformed because he accepts the myth that one day socialism will triumph, and justice for all will prevail. What mattered for Sorel, in both cases, is not the scientific truth or falsity of the myth believed in, but what believing in the myth does to the lives of those who have accepted it, and who refuse to be daunted by the repeated failure of their apocalyptic expectations. How many times have Christians in the last two thousand years been convinced that the Second Coming was at hand, only to be bitterly disappointed — yet none of these disappointments was ever enough to keep them from holding on to their great myth. So, too, Sorel argued, the myth of socialism will continue to have power, despite the various failures of socialist experiments, so long as there are revolutionaries who are unwilling to relinquish their great myth. That is why he rejected scientific socialism — if it was merely science, it lacked the power of a religion to change individual’s lives. Thus for Sorel there was “an…analogy between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even the reconstruction of the individual — a gigantic task.”

[….]

The Blaze

…Google frequently honors important figures or dates with its popular “doodles,” but the decision to honor Chavez while many around the world were marking Easter sparked an intense reaction from some on social media. The search engine Bing decorated its homepage with Easter eggs.

Still, a search of Google’s past doodles shows they have honored Easter just once in the United States — in 2000 — and tend not to recognize specific religious holidays. While they regularly post special logos for Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, Earth Day and other dates, certain doodles tend to be more esoteric….

Gateway Pundit

While 2.1 billion Christians around the world celebrate Easter Sunday on this 31st day of March, Google is using its famous ‘Doodle’ search logo art to mark the birth of left-wing labor leader, Cesar Chavez.

Dennis Prager explains this odd choice, via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit: “You cannot understand the Left if you do not understand that leftism is a religion.”….

Daily Caller

…Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt was an informal adviser to both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns, a member of the Obama White House transition team in 2009 and a onetime prospect for an Obama Cabinet post during the president’s second term.

As The Daily Caller has reported, Schmidt is also a steadfast climate-change activist, and has advocated for the complete termination of the oil, natural gas, and coal industries, and predicted that Washington, D.C. will soon be completely underwater due to climate change. (RELATED: Schmidt’s influence in the Obama White House)

Fox News

Wow. At any rate, Caesar Chavez does not fit the mold of the modern Left. see my post “Comedian Paul Rodriguez Strays from CNN’s Script,” for some examples of just how “xenophobic” he was.


C H R I S T M A S


I lost my Christmas graphics and post for this one… so I will merely show the graphics from a couple of years via Google, followed by an example of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day by Bing:

I wonder who these angels pictured below would be heralding?

Are you getting the picture? It is worth a thousand words.


E C O – D E A T H
Memorial Day ~ Google vs. Bing


  • Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock, p. 292.

Google ignored an American Tribute to our men and women of the military on Memorial Day (first GOOGLE, followed by BING):

However, the day AFTER Memorial Day I saw this graphic, and had no idea what it was for:

I thought it was some dumb holiday or solstice, or something. It couldn’t be that easy, right? Moonbattery explains its meaning:

Moonbattery

Yesterday Google barely acknowledged Memorial Day, with a tiny little flag that contrasted sharply against the sea of flags on display on Bing’s homepage. But today is a holiday the Google people can get behind. It’s Rachel Carson’s birthday:

Rachel Carson was an environmental extremist best known for the book Silent Spring, a work of alarmist propaganda that led to the banning of the most beneficial substance ever created in terms of saving human lives, DDT, which was instrumental in largely ridding Western countries of malaria.

Malaria continues to be a very serious problem in Third World countries, which Western moonbats of the sort who consider Rachel Carson to be an admirable character have leaned on heavily to stop using DDT. The result has been by some estimates as many as 50 million unnecessary deaths.

Among Carson’s fellow progressive luminaries, only communist dictators Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin can top her body count

…read more…

The above (audio) and below are Dennis Prager explaining more about DDT and other issues:

Go on to Google today and you’ll see a charming illustration celebrating the life and work of environmentalist Rachel Carson. There’s a turtle and a pelican and a crab and a delightful seal in an idyllic landscape of flowers and trees and water. But what are missing from the picture, for some bizarre reason, are the dead bodies of the millions of people who died of malaria thanks to Carson’s principled campaigning against the insecticide DDT.

Will Google be paying similar tribute to any of the other mass killers of the 20th century? Hitler? Stalin? Mao? Pol Pot? Probably not. But then, none of the others have had the benefit of having their images burnished by a thousand and one starry eyed greenies. Nor, unlike Carson – as I note in The Little Green Book of Eco Fascism –  do they have named after them a school, a bridge, a hiking trail, three environmental prizes and an annual “sustainable” feast day (at her birthplace in Springdale, Pennsylvania)…

…How many people died as a result of Carson’s scaremongering? We cannot be sure. But in 1965 the National Academy of Sciences estimated that over the two previous decades DDT had “prevented 500 million deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.”

(Breitbart)

Dennis Prager

Environmentalism and Human Sacrifice

…These are the people who coerced nations worldwide into banning DDT. It is generally estimated this ban has led to the deaths of about 50 million human beings, overwhelmingly African children, from malaria. DDT kills the mosquito that spreads malaria to human beings.

US News and World Report writer Carrie Lukas reported in 2010, “Fortunately, in September 2006, the World Health Organization announced a change in policy: It now recommends DDT for indoor use to fight malaria. The organization’s Dr. Anarfi Asamoa-Baah explained, ‘The scientific and programmatic evidence clearly supports this reassessment. Indoor residual spraying (IRS) is useful to quickly reduce the number of infections caused by malaria-carrying mosquitoes. IRS has proven to be just as cost effective as other malaria prevention measures and DDT presents no health risk when used properly.'”

Though Lukas blames environmentalists for tens of millions of deaths, she nevertheless describes environmentalists as “undoubtedly well-intentioned.”

I offer two assessments of this judgment.

First, in life it is almost always irrelevant whether or not an individual or a movement is well intentioned. It is difficult to name a movement that has committed great evil whose members woke up each day asking, “What evil can I commit today?” Nearly all of them think they’re well intentioned. Good intentions don’t mean a thing.

Second, while environmentalists believe they have good intentions, I do not believe their intentions are good.

Concern for the natural environment is certainly laudable and every normal person shares it. But the organized environmentalist movement — Lomborg specifically cites Greenpeace, Naomi Klein and the New York Times — is led by fanatics. The movement’s value system is morally askew. It places a pristine natural world above the well-being of human beings.

The environmentalist movement’s responsibility for the deaths of tens of millions of poor children in the Third World is the most egregious example….

…read more…