Christmas Eve ReadsPosted: December 24, 2019
It’s Christmas Eve and I’m going to begin this post with a little more history behind modern Christmas traditions. The Independent: The dark history of Christmas traditions.
People have been marking the midwinter for far longer than the 2000-odd years since the birth of Christ… and even that’s in doubt, anyway. It was only in the year 340 AD that Pope Julius I fixed the date of Jesus’s birthday at 25 December.
Prior to that it was marked on at least three different other dates: 29 March, 6 January, and sometime in June – which historians today think is most likely, given that the nativity is meant to have occurred during a census-taking.
It was 250 years later that Julius’s successor a few times removed, Pope Gregory, gave the job to Saint Augustine of converting the heathen Brits to Christianity.
Fortunately, with the birth of Christ now established as 25 December, it gave Augustine a bit of leverage with the population who were already marking several midwinter festivals, ensuring they could take this new-fangled religion on board without losing the annual December piss-up.
Because the idea of getting blind-drunk at Christmas isn’t something invented by the Pogues and your dad. There were two major pre-Christian festivals of note which roughly coincided with Christmas: the Roman Bacchanalia, or Saturnalia, and the Yule Feast of the Norse countries.
The Saturnalia began on 19 December and lasted for the best part of a week, which sounds about right for those currently enmeshed in the Christmas party rush. Morality and restraint were politely shown the back door, schools were closed, no criminals were punished.
The Roman god Saturn, in whose honour the festival was staged, was no benign Christ-figure or benevolent Santa, even though his party was eventually absorbed into Christmas. Ancient astrologers thought being born under the sign of Saturn was bad news.
Slaves were allowed to swap places with their masters, and one was elected king for the duration of the festival. The wealthy distributed gifts to the poor.
On Christmas Eve “restless spirits walked the earth.”
Should you be brave enough, legend has it that if you venture into a graveyard on Christmas Eve and dig a hole, then you’ll find gold.
But be careful getting there; on that night cattle are said to kneel down and speak in human voices. And those leaving church on Christmas Eve while the consecration is still going on are bang-on guaranteed to witness a procession of ghosts wending their way through the streets.
Speaking of supernatural beings abroad on Christmas Eve, what about the big man himself? Father Christmas, Santa, Saint Nick. Why do we hang a stocking out for him? Because, according to legend, Saint Nicholas heard about three sisters who were forced into a life of prostitution to earn enough money to eat, so he tossed three coins down their chimney to help them out, which landed in the girls’ stockings drying on the hearth.
Father Christmas as a jolly old man with a white beard was indeed thought to be based on St Nicholas, who can be traced back to Asia Minor in about 350 AD (around the time Pope Julius was fixing the date of Jesus’s birth), and somewhere along the way he got mashed up with other folklorish characters, including Kris Kringle from 19th-century German tradition.
Read more about the history behind Christmas traditions at The Folklore Society.
Now on to today’s politics reads:
This interview with Rudy Giuliani is wild. Olivia Nuzzi at New York Magazine: A Conversation With Rudy Giuliani Over Bloody Marys at the Mark Hotel.
It was early in the afternoon on Sunday, December 8, and Giuliani had just returned from Ukraine, where he said he was looking for information to undermine the case to impeach his client, President Donald Trump. [….]
Over a sweater, he wore a navy-blue suit, the fly of the pants unzipped. He accessorized with an American-flag lapel pin, American-flag woven wallet, a diamond-encrusted pinky ring, and a diamond-encrusted Yankees World Series ring (about which an innocent question resulted in a 15-minute rant about “fucking Wayne Barrett,” a journalist who manages to enrage Giuliani even in death).
In addition to being the president’s free personal attorney, Giuliani, who is 75, is an informal White House cybersecurity adviser and a high-priced cyber-security contractor. In one hand, he clutched three phones of varying sizes. Two of the devices were unlocked, their screens revealing open tabs and a barrage of banner notifications as they knocked into each other and reacted to Giuliani’s grip. He accidentally activated Siri, who said she didn’t understand his command. “She never understands me,” he said. He sighed and poked at the device, attempting to quiet her….
Giuliani is quick to announce that he knows “every block of this city,” but he lives on the Upper East Side and doesn’t linger much across or below the park. When I asked him to bring me somewhere he likes to hang out, he quickly directed his bodyguard to the Mark, a five-star hotel on East 77th Street. Always a creature of habit, Giuliani is extra-aware of where he’s welcome these days. He says that “because of what’s happened” his circle is tightening, that he doesn’t trust anyone anymore.
I asked him how he ever trusted Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Russian associates with a business called Fraud Guarantee who were arrested by the FBI in October. “They look like Miami people. I know a lot of Miami people that look like that that are perfectly legitimate and act like them,” Giuliani said. “Neither one of them have ever been convicted of a crime. Neither one. And generally that’s my cutoff point, because if you do it based on allegations and claims and — you’re not gonna work with anybody,” he said, laughing. “Particularly in business.”
As we sped uptown, he spoke in monologue about the scandal he co-created, weaving one made-up talking point into another and another. He said former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, whom he calls Santa Maria Yovanovitch, is “controlled” by George Soros. “He put all four ambassadors there. And he’s employing the FBI agents.” I told him he sounded crazy, but he insisted he wasn’t.
“Don’t tell me I’m anti-Semitic if I oppose him,” he said. “Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is. I probably know more about — he doesn’t go to church, he doesn’t go to religion — synagogue. He doesn’t belong to a synagogue, he doesn’t support Israel, he’s an enemy of Israel. He’s elected eight anarchist DA’s in the United States. He’s a horrible human being.”
Read the rest of the demented interview at NY Mag.
At CNN Vicky Ward writes about David Correia, who a co-conspirator in the Ukraine mess: The invisible man: Text messages reveal former golfer’s role in Ukraine scandal.
When Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman traveled to Ukraine last winter to help Rudy Giuliani dig up dirt on President Donald Trump’s political opponents, they were accompanied by a 44 year-old American named David Correia.
A former pro golfer and restaurateur, Correia had gotten to know Parnas and Fruman in South Florida, where he’d gone into business with Parnas years earlier.While Parnas and Fruman, who had high-level contacts in Ukraine, worked to gather documents that they believed showed evidence of corruption by Joe Biden and his son Hunter, Correia was there to make the effort pay off in lucrative business deals, according to people who talked to him at the time, as well as copies of text messages obtained by CNN.Before the trip, Correia texted an American associate that he wanted to “be fully prepared to close specific deals in Ukraine while we are there,” according to the message viewed by CNN. Though he had no experience in the gas or energy business prior to working with Parnas, Correia was bent on securing a deal to sell US liquified natural gas to Ukraine through a pipeline in Poland.When the three men were indicted in October for illegally funneling foreign money into Republican political circles, attention quickly focused on Parnas and Fruman, who have become key characters in the ongoing impeachment saga of President Donald Trump.Meanwhile Correia’s role has gotten little scrutiny. In part, that’s due to the lack of detail in the indictment beyond Correia’s alleged involvement in an effort to lobby for a marijuana business that, according to the indictment, was secretly backed by a Russian businessman. Compared to the four counts Parnas and Fruman face, Correia was charged with just one. All three men have pleaded not guilty.
Read all the details at CNN.
Democrats are talking about new articles of impeachment against Trump. Politico: House counsel suggests Trump could be impeached again.
House Counsel Douglas Letter said in a filing in federal court that a second impeachment could be necessary if the House uncovers new evidence that Trump attempted to obstruct investigations of his conduct. Letter made the argument as part of an inquiry by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals into whether Democrats still need testimony from former White House counsel Don McGahn after the votes last week to charge Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
“If McGahn’s testimony produces new evidence supporting the conclusion that President Trump committed impeachable offenses that are not covered by the Articles approved by the House, the Committee will proceed accordingly — including, if necessary, by considering whether to recommend new articles of impeachment,” Letter wrote.
It’s the first impeachment-related filing by the House since lawmakers voted, mostly along party lines, to impeach Trump over allegations stemming from efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rivals. It comes just hours after the Justice Department argued that the impeachment votes undercut lawmakers’ ongoing court case demanding testimony from McGahn, who was special counsel Robert Mueller’s central witness.
Paul Waldman at The Washington Post: Could Democrats impeach Trump twice? They might have to.
While we wait for Mitch McConnell and the White House to figure out whether they can get away with beginning and ending President Trump’s impeachment trial in an afternoon, a provocative new question has been raised: Once impeachment is over, presumably with an acquittal in the Senate, could House Democrats impeach Trump for a second time?
Don’t dismiss it as an absurd idea just yet. Not only might it happen, but it also might be absolutely necessary. At the very least, considering the possibility will help us understand just how deep our governing crisis could get if Trump wins a second term in office….
The first thing to understand is that the mere fact that no president has ever been impeached more than once doesn’t mean that it can’t happen if the president’s behavior warrants it. There’s no “one and done” clause in the Constitution stating that Congress has only one opportunity to impeach, and if the president is acquitted then he has a free pass for the rest of his time in office.
And if there were ever a circumstance where a president at least hypothetically might warrant a second impeachment, it’s this one: a president with utter disregard for all norms of ethical behavior who nonetheless has enough slavish support from members of his party in the Senate to make conviction virtually impossible.
To clarify, I’m not talking about Trump being impeached again for the misdeeds for which he is currently being called to account. I’m talking about an impeachment for new misdeeds that we have yet to discover, or that he has not yet committed but will in the future.
What stories are you following today (if any!)?