Happy Winter Solstice!!!

Today was the official beginning of Winter, as we entered the Winter Solstice. Now I know everyone celebrates x-mas, hannukah & kwanzaa but if we look deep into our history books, the Winter Solstice was the original holiday during this time of year. Sure, some think that the overzealous religions of our world stole this holiday from the "pagans" (read: indigenous people who were here long before Christianity demonized them) & put it to their own use but it's deeper than that. If you look up "the true meaning of xmas" in the dictionary, you'd see 2 things: 1) a picture of Jimmy Stewart from It's a Wonderful Life & 2) an excerpt from any early civilization's Winter Solstice celebrations.

It's no secret that many early civilizations were very advanced in the area of astronomy; just as it's no coincidence that these civilization's calendars, if still in use today, would be FAR more accurate than our, current Gregorian calendar (can you say Leap Year, 2hr. offsets every yr, etc?). Why? Simply because they were one with the stars, sun & moon. Their lives were intimately tied to the seasons & the cycle of harvest. Countless civilizations built their greatest landmarks to align with the solstices: everyone knows about Stonehenge, the Pyramids in Egypt, etc. but there are so many more I can't even begin to list them all (there's even one here in the U.S.- in New Mexico). The solstices were a time to celebrate fertility, family & the benevolence/generosity of the Sun in their daily lives, as well as to pray for a blessed harvest in the following cycle. Sure sounds a lot like what xmas, kwanzaa & hannukah are "supposed" to stand for these days.

Like Levar Burton used to say on Reading Rainbow, "but you don't have to take my word for it." "Take a look, it's in a book..."