Michelangelo sibyl from the Sistine Chapel

 

the twelve days

As often as I am annoyed by Martha Stewart and her program on television, I do learn something of value from her once in a while. Today she got me to thinking some more about the rituals that people perform at Christmas, when she explained that the song the Twelve Days of Christmas is not just a cute song, but has certain religion connotations contained within it. After I did some searching, I found other web sites that said the same thing, so there might be some truth to it.

According to her and other sources, when the Catholics were being persecuted in England the song was sung to help them remember their faith. Such examples include the six geese a laying as being representative of the six days of creation and the eleven pipers are meant to symbolize the eleven faithful apostles.

This was the first time that I had ever heard this and it made me wonder about some of the other things that people do during this time. It seems to me that much of the original reasons for doing what we do during the holidays has been lost to us. We just do it now without thinking about it. Over time we seem to lose any reasoning behind our actions and simply mimic what we were taught as children. I find all of this to be very sad.

I haven't been to church on Christmas in years and part of this forgotten knowledge is part of it. One of my biggest problems with organized religion is that they never give a very accurate picture of what they are teaching. They only present one angle and hope that no one asks any critical questions or probes any deeper. What they tell you is supposed to be enough and that doesn't work for me.

Never do they discuss how the bible was pieced together from various texts over the centuries. Nor do they talk about the books and passages that were eliminated. We are just supposed to accept the current product as being all that we need. I find all of it to be very condescending and is a major part of why I do not go to church. The hypocrisy is too much for me and this is even more evident by the people that attend church only on major holidays. It must be purely for show and it makes me ill.

I won't even get started on how annoyed I am by people that quote scripture. How they can find any real meaning in something that has been translated from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to German to Elizabethan English to modern English is beyond me. Words have very different meanings in other languages. Something is truly lost in the translation.

 
yesterday | index | tomorrow | one year ago