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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here each week.Joe Carillo
Precisely how did December 25 become Christmas?
Our time out from English grammar is the perfect time to know more about the joyous celebration that we all know as Christmas. In an article he wrote for The Biblical Archeology Review, “How December 25 Became Christmas,” Andrew McGowan, warden and president of Trinity College at the University of Melbourne, Australia, traces the origins of the Christmas festival and how it came to be so intimately associated with the birthday of Jesus Christ.
McGowan concludes that in the end, we cannot be entirely sure how December 25 became Christmas. “Elements of the festival that developed from the fourth century until modern times may well derive from pagan traditions,” he says. “Yet the actual date might really derive more from Judaism—from Jesus’ death at Passover, and from the rabbinic notion that great things might be expected, again and again, at the same time of the year—than from paganism. Then again, in this notion of cycles and the return of God’s redemption, we may perhaps also be touching upon something that the pagan Romans who celebrated Sol Invictus, and many other peoples since, would have understood and claimed for their own too.”
Read Andrew McGowan’s “How December 25 Became Christmas” now!
