Four Questions Friday asks questions about what you know about Christmas.
1. What is the scariest legend or myth you know about anything to do with Christmas?
2. What year did Rudoplh first appear and in what?
3. Since there was a real St. Nicholas bgehind the Santa Claus legend, what good thing did he do, and what was his occupation?
4. What can you tell us about the mistletoe?
2 comments:
1. Dickens' Christmas Carol is pretty scary what with Marley's ghost and the spirits showing Scrooge some pretty awful things about himself.
2. 1939 in a book by Robert L. May
3. St. Nick was a Bishop
4. Parasitic plant that grows on Oak trees. It's highly poisonous, so I guess it could fit into #1 too.
I looked up everything, of course. Except the Scrooge answer. I remember being quite frightened by the story when I was a kid. That was just after Dickens first published the book naturally.
That Krampus thing you posted about is pretty unnerving. So are some variants of the Yule Cat.
1939. Rudolph was introduced/created for advertising for Montgomery Ward, I believe. He really took off with the song by Gene Autry.
St. Nicholas was a bishop (of Smyrna, I think). He is said to have given three bags of gold to three young women (sisters??) for their dowry so they could get married. Maybe it was just 3 gold coins because somehow this works into the symbol for pawnshops. St. Nicholas is the patron of pawnbrokers as well as of children.
Mistletoe is a parasite found on oak trees (probably other trees as well). It was considered a sacred plant by the Druids and is "the golden bough." Today, of course, if you're standing under the mistletoe you get kissed so I'm guessing it had something to do with fertility rites as well.
meggins
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