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The first Christmas tree was brought from Germany by Prince Albert to the royal household in the s.
These days, about 7m real trees are sold in the UK each year , and as many as 30m in the US. Last year, about 1bn Christmas cards were sold in the UK. One in six people say it takes up to a whole year to pay off the cost of their Christmas splurge, and then the pressure to spend begins piling up again from about mid-October onwards.
Church of England figures show that 2. This year the C of E has launched a digital campaign, FollowTheStar , inviting people to visit their local church over Christmas. Indeed, there are a lot of them. Rather then being resentful of a Christian festival, Muslims often commit to extra charity work over the Christmas period, and some mosques hold special lectures about Jesus, considered in Islam to be a prophet.
The festival of Eid al-Fitr, the festival that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan, is sometimes called by non-Muslims the Muslim equivalent of Christmas in as far as it is a time spent with family and gifts are exchanged. The next time Eid al-Fitr and Christmas coincide is The most famous centres on a promotional campaign run over three months by Birmingham city council in , called Winterval. Critics wrongly claimed the council leader had tried to substitute a Harry Potter festival called Luminos for a proper Christian Christmas.
Wish I had thought of it! They also possess a high level of intelligence and creativity. I am a bit of a trivia freak myself and the research was interesting for this one. They are good in a crisis because they don't panic easily. Ladyguitarpicker, did you son always feel a bit cheated having a December birthday?
The name refers to a Christmas box traditionally given to servants and tradespeople, containing money, a gift and sometimes leftover food. How they got there reveals much about the young religion. So why did the Roman Church adopt 25 December? Did they adopt Saturnalia, a Roman festival of gift-giving and feasting that was celebrated in December? Saturnalia was celebrated earlier in December and Christian writers don't mention adapting their calendar to fit in with it.
Pagan revelry was adopted later. Did they adopt the Roman sun god, Sol Invictus, and simply replace Sol with Jesus as the 'light of the world'? Debate about 25 December preceded Rome's adoption of Christianity, so it wasn't where the date came from.
But it could be why Roman Christians then favoured it. Early Christians were steeped in theology, using reason to increase their grasp of their religion. They would have had a rationale for picking 25 December.
Early Christians mined the scriptures for symbolic meaning as well as facts. Could this have influenced their choice for Christmas? Christian authors writing in the 3rd Century were exploring theological arguments for when Jesus might have been conceived and therefore born nine months later.
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Neale Neale, John Mason, D. He inherited intellectual power on both sides: John's College, Cambridge, and his mother being the daughter of John Mason Good, a man of considerable learning.