Winter. Pagan Party Time?

The concept of a winter festival dates back before the Romans and usually had more to do with the winter solstice than anything resembling today’s religions, and evolved into a Christian holiday.

Today, if you look around, this holiday and festival period has devolved back to a pagan party. Drive through the neighborhoods, walk through shopping centers, and watch television, you will not see very much religion. For that matter, most of the music you’ll hear will be winter related, not Christ related despite the name, Christmas Holiday.

When the earliest people recognized the winter solstice as being the day with the least amount of daylight, and that the following days’ light increased slightly one to the next, it was obviously party time. The next solar year was under way, and they needed to celebrate that. It was a gradual moving ahead, advancing toward the awakening with the arrival of the spring equinox.

Our most ancient ancestors lived by the solar year. They planted, hunted, married, and bred their animals based on where the sun was in the sky. Grand monuments exist even today to attest to that. Think Stonehenge, and many traditional farmers around the world depend on the ancient solar year knowledge.

But, let’s get back to the party thing. Norse, that is Viking, invaders wee probably the last of the Europeans to continue the winter solstice pagan rituals and brought many of those into their invaded lands. Yuletide became Christmastide, for instance. The original Yule log and its burning was pagan as was the hanging of evergreen wreaths.

The Roman church found that it was far easier to incorporate pagan holidays into their religious program than to deny converts their pagan holidays and festivals. Think Saturnalia for example. Whew.

Regardless of what it is you’re celebrating, on or about December 21^st, the world will welcome the winter solstice and six weeks later the ground hog will tell us there will be another six weeks of winter, and then six weeks later we will celebrate the spring equinox. Funny how that works.

The idea of the days getting longer brought joy to the so-called pagan world, and today, the period around the winter solstice brings warm fuzzy feelings to businesses across this vast nation of ours.

Until next time, read good books and stay regular

Johnny Gunn

www.amazon.com/author/gunnjohnny

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Lodge Night Frolics

A bunch of us were sitting at the bar at our lodge the other night after I mouthed off about something during the meeting. “You talk almost as much as you write,” one of the guys said. I had to chuckle at that. I spent so many years in radio talking up a storm that it seems to flow with little outside help. As a newsman, writing was something one did if one wanted a paycheck on Friday.

“You don’t have much trouble grabbing a wrench, old son,” I replied, signaling our barman brother for another round. He nodded and the light came on. He was always first to help a brother if his truck broke down or the fridge quit.

“Yup,” he said. “It’s what I do.” We sipped a bit and he continued. “So, what do you like writing the most? For me, I’d rather work on an older car than these new-fangled jobby-dos.”

“News is good to write but sometimes it’s difficult to keep your own opinion to yourself. Novels are very gratifying, particularly when you write ‘the end’ on that last page, but short stories, there you’ve got lots of problems.”

“Why?” A couple of the old boys asked at the same time, and I kind of understood the question. “Seems like a little old short story would be easier to write than a big old long novel,” Pinky said.

“Seems like it,” I said. “But, just ain’t so. With brevity in every part of your mind you tell just the essence of a particular instance in someone’s life or situation when writing a short story, while writing a novel, you tell the entire life and all the situations.”

“You got a favorite short story?” I think it was old man Peebles that asked. I’d autographed three of my novels for him and remembered him saying that he’d never really read many short stories. He said something about they end too soon.

“Actually, I have several that I really enjoyed writing. Two that you can get right now are available on Amazon. Others were published in magazines and would be difficult to find. I really enjoyed writing Miss Minerva’s Sheriff. It was part of an anthology but it is available as a stand alone short story.” I wrote down the Amazon URL for the guys.

http://www.amazon.com/Miss-Minervas-Sheriff-Johnny-Gunn-ebook/dp/B01CEUMZTW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456951151&sr=8-1&keywords=miss+minerva%27s+sheriff+johnny+gunn

“The other one that tickles me came out last year at about this same time in a holiday anthology. You might remember when we took that ride into the mountains to cut Christmas trees for those families that couldn’t afford one for themselves and I read it out loud. Slick’s Special Christmas.”

“You’re always reading something out loud,” Peebles laughed. “I remember that, though. It’s still available?’

“Yup,” I said and wrote down the URL for them.

https://www.amazon.com/Slicks-Special-Christmas-Johnny-Gunn-ebook/dp/B01N1OYVPT/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1481028102&sr=1-1&keywords=johnny+gunn

“You see, guys, telling the story is the most fun I get from all this. That sheriff never knew what hit him when Minerva came to town, but the entire episode had to be told quickly, and long involved details weren’t important to the crux of the matter.

“Same with Slick. He was tore up bad, bleeding, infected, and what happened to him two weeks later wasn’t important. What was important was what was happening at that moment in time. That’s the pleasure and the pain of the short story.”

“Well, just quit talking, now,” old man Peebles said, laughing right out loud. “Drink your beer and we’ll just sit here quietly and think about all this.”

I didn’t say a word, just motioned to our barman brother for another round of cold ones.

Until next time, read good books and stay regular

Johnny Gunn

www.amazon.com/author/gunnjohnny

Will you join me on facebook from time to time?

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Or Tweet with me, darlin’?

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Mele Kalikimaka

The holiday season is fast approaching and I thought maybe we could have a quick discussion about some of the aspects of this particular season. Our ancestors thousands of generations past whooped it up some from the winter solstice to the spring equinox and it seems as though we’ve forgotten the concept of having fun. If it doesn’t have something to do with either spending money or making money, it doesn’t exist.

As an example: Black Friday. The initial attack on Thanksgiving was the major box stores putting up Christmas decorations a week or so before Halloween, thus taking a lot of the fun out of celebrating All Hallow’s Eve. But by slamming every square space in retail outlets with Christmas all through the month of November, they diminished the celebration of Thanksgiving.

Traditionally, Thanksgiving was a time for family, for celebrating the harvest, for giving thanks for what we have and for that which we strive. There was some fight by many who wanted the Thanksgiving pleasures, but those that make money and those that spend money fought harder. Thus: Black Friday.

And they weren’t through. If they started the Black Friday sales early, such as maybe on Thursday, Thanksgiving would be but a memory, for in our society today, making it to a sale is far more important than having the family sitting together spinning tales of yesteryear.

As I write this little missive, we are a full two weeks from Thanksgiving and I saw an advertisement this morning for a pre-Black Friday sale to begin tomorrow. All of the blame for this cannot be laid at the feet of the retailer for it is not the retailer that responds to the sales.

With Thanksgiving wiped off the calendar, there is now no less than nine weeks in which to entice us to buy, and buy we will. Whether we buy Christmas gifts or Holiday gifts, or Seasonal gifts, we’ll buy, and in droves.

Obviously Christmas began as a Christian celebration but was absorbed into general society easily since non-Christians were already celebrating the winter solstice with their parties and hooplas. Simple gift-giving has changed slightly more than exponentially over the last two thousand years or so. The gift, it seems, is meaningless. It’s the sale that counts.

If you took the words Christmas, Holiday, and Seasonal out of the picture, took any nine-week period in the calendar, and spent the effort and money that is spent on what we call the holiday period, you would have the same affect. No one seems to give two hoots and a holler about Thanksgiving, Christmas, or the winter solstice. No, it’s the sales that are far more important.

Madison Avenue has not won yet. Advantage: MA. But there are still beat up old zealots like myself fighting them off. I’m not the biggest Halloween nut you’ve ever seen, but I do enjoy the fun of it. I am a Thanksgiving nut and really get into the idea of having lots of family around and spending many hours in the kitchen and at the table.

The winter solstice parties evolving in the Christmas celebrations are big-time around our household, with lights blazing, Yule logs burning, and of course, the Wassail cup must be full at all times. The gifting? That’s fun, but not the driving force. It’s the music, seasonal or religious, and the gay colors and lights, long nights with roaring fires, and family and friends.

Mele Kalikimaka.

Until next time, read good books and stay regular

Johnny Gunn

www.amazon.com/author/gunnjohnny

Will you join me on facebook from time to time?

https://www.facebook.com/johnny.gunn.31

Or Tweet with me, darlin’?

https://twitter.com/johnnygunn11