Every Christmas we wonder why astrologers were compelled to travel a thousand kilometers across the desert. I have no idea. But I do know that there is always something interesting happening in the sky. In 2020, the December conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter rewarded anyone who looked up at night. This year my telescopes will be turned to the constellations Eridanus and Cetus.
Not being on the zodiac, they do not enjoy the attendant mysticism. It is just that my living now at 30N latitude makes those constellations easier to explore. Also, I am writing about Keid (40 Eridani) and its companion omicron Eridani. (It has two, denoted B and C, but I do not expect to overcome the urban sky here.) I observed the orange giant Menkar alpha Ceti last week. Tonight through Thursday, the sky should be clear and the full Moon not obscuring the view with Thursday night being the best opportunity with a later rising of the Moon.
We think of Christmas as a continuing tradition, uninterrupted for 2000 years. But it was interrupted and abandoned. We do not understand Ebenezer Scrooge. He was a religious conservative of that time, a fundamentalist Protestant. Calvinists of that time had come to accept that you demonstrate your election and bring others to salvation by working hard and being thrifty. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism begins by republishing Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth.
It is nice to have the week off as a paid holiday. That is an old tradition, but not the one most people usually think of. The year of 365¼ days was reconciled with the circle of 360 degrees by not counting the five dead days between the winter solstice feast of Saturn and the start of the Julian New Year. It was a direct import from Egypt because of Cleopatra Ptolemy’s alliance with Gaius Julius Caesar.
The Thebans say that they are the earliest of all men and the first people among whom philosophy and the exact science of the stars were discovered, since their country enables them to observe more distinctly than others the rising and settings of the stars. Peculiar to them also is their ordering of the months and years. For they do not reckon the days by the moon, but by the sun, making their month of thirty days, and they add five and a quarter days to the twelve months and in this way fill out the cycle of the year. But they do not intercalate months or subtract days, as most of the Greeks do. – Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Book I, paragraph 50. (Online at U Chicago Penelope here.)
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| A Colonial Christmas |
Christmas on December 25 has not much support in Biblical text. After a hiatus, Christmas was re-invented. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) fit with the invention of the Christmas greeting card (1843) which took advantage of the invention of the postage stamp (1840).
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
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