Speaker For The Diodes - QotD

05:24 am - QotD

"She stuck her head out and took a deep breath. If she could eat the cold air, she would. She thought cold snaps were like cookies, like gingersnaps. In her mind they were made with white chocolate chunks and had a cool, brittle vanilla frosting. They melted like snow in her mouth, turning creamy and warm." -- Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen

Merry Christmas again! This time for "old calendar" Orthodox churches^[1] such as most Russian Orthodox congregations.

[1] (Most?All?) Eastern Orthodox churches use the Julian calendar to set the date of Easter, but "new calendar" Orthodox churches celebrate Christmas (and IIUC, other feasts that aren't tied to the date of Easter) on the Gregorian calendar. "Old calendar" Orthodox churches use the Julian calendar for all (again, IIUC) their liturgical dates, including Christmas. So if an old-calendar Orthodox church celebrates Christmas starting on 25 December^[2], that winds up being 7 January on the Gregorian calendar most of us use for secular stuff (whether we also use it for religious dates or not).

[2] Some churches -- old-calendar and new-calendar -- celebrate Christmas on 6 January^[3]. And that can be either Gregorian 6 Jan or Julian 6 Jan depending on whether a particular church is old-calendar or new-calendar. So converting everything to Gregorian dates, there are five possible dates for the first day of Christmas (Coptic leap years can shift Coptic Cristmas by a day relative to the Gregorian calendar -- that's the extra date): 25 December, 6 January, 7 January (Julian 25 Dec), 8 January (Coptic 29 Koiak, wich can be either 25 or 26 December in the Julian Calendar and thus either 7 or 8 January in the Gregorian calendar), and 19 January (Julian 6 Jan) ... that I know of so far. So, look ... instead of celebrating Christmas from Black Friday until a week before New Year, just celebrate it from the last week of December through the first week of February!

[3] I learn so much when I look up something I already knew to make sure I've remembered it right and there's stuff I didn't know yet right next to it. Or when reading an article about something I thought I knew that I didn't have quite right, like why 25 December is most folks' Christmas.