However, (to nit-pick) if Christmas is just a big winter solstice celebration, and merely overlaid on top of older religions, how come we don't celebrate summer solstice?
I think religions that adopt older religions for their purposes only adopt the parts that are useful (i.e. overlapping) and disregard others. It's interesting how that affects the religions being adopted, even by those practitioners who stick to their original beliefs (i.e. Judaism and Hanukkah.) And even if there are similarities, I think the calendar would look very different if any Native American religion had been dominant for the past 500 years. (As would the map.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2005-12-13 09:37 pm (UTC)However, (to nit-pick) if Christmas is just a big winter solstice celebration, and merely overlaid on top of older religions, how come we don't celebrate summer solstice?
I think religions that adopt older religions for their purposes only adopt the parts that are useful (i.e. overlapping) and disregard others. It's interesting how that affects the religions being adopted, even by those practitioners who stick to their original beliefs (i.e. Judaism and Hanukkah.) And even if there are similarities, I think the calendar would look very different if any Native American religion had been dominant for the past 500 years. (As would the map.)