![]() In East Asia, the solstice, marked as the Dongzhi Festival under their solar calendar, the “extreme of winter” is a feast celebration dating back to the Han Dynasty of 206 B.C.E. In Southeast Asia, Makar Sankranti, noted for its flying of kites, is a festival of the solstice that falls in January, marks the end of harvesting, and celebrates the days beginning to grow longer again. ![]() In what is now modern Iran, the “ Yalda Night” festival has been celebrated marking the solstice since the ancient Persian King Darius the Great, entering their official calendar in 502 B.C.E. to 1500 B.C.E.) and Newgrange in Ireland(3200 B.C.E.) were built to align with the sun on solstices. In neolithic Europe, both Stonehenge in England (constructed in stages from 3000 B.C.E. The tale’s profound moral teaching stands to timelessly warm our striving hearts, and to warn us all against ignorance, hatred, bigotry, greed, selfishness, and the exploitation of others.ĭickens called it his “sledge hammer blow … on behalf of The Poor Man’s Child.” The history of winter festivals and feasts, and Christmas An illustration of winter solstice at ancient Stonehenge. Over the last 179 years, A Christmas Carol has been adapted countless times for every form of media and performance known. It has never been out of print since.ĭickens’ work reinvigorated the holiday, its festivities, and Christmas celebrations in Victorian England and 19th Century America, reverberating in kind down to our own celebrations today. photo posted by Karen Arnold.īut in 1843, 31-year-old English author and journalist Charles Dickens, a prodigy who had already gained fame and acclaim with “The Pickwick Papers,” and “Oliver Twist,” would write his holiday classic, “A Christmas Carol,” in just six weeks. English author and journalist Charles Dickens at his writing desk. In the early 19th Century, however, Christmas began to flounder into a more minor holiday. In our time, in the Western world, Christmas has become the primary heir to many of these traditions, manifested in a holiday punch stirred out of the advent of Christianity, the pagan celebrations of ancient Scandinavia, Germany and Rome, and the feasts and solstice celebrations of our earliest civilizations. The winter solstice this year fell Wednesday, Dec. Using the stars and sun as a guide for monitoring the seasons, humans through history sowed their crops, stocked food reserves, bred their livestock, and held last feasts before the setting of the deep winter, with celebrations often placed on the solstice itself - the shortest day of the year before they begin to grow longer again. Since the stone age, winter festivals have bestowed their warming glow of fire and light and bountiful feast in nearly every culture of human civilization drudging through the cold, dark, biting months surrounding the solstice.
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