Specifically, I'm starting from a place where I'm cranky at the whole mushing together of various holy days into some sort of Christmas-flavored mishmash celebrated on 25 December. I see a lot of stringing-together-holidays without any apparent knowledge or awareness of them. (There are people including Ramadan in their generic-holiday-well-wish-list this year. Ramadan! Which cycles on a lunar calendar. What will they do in a couple of years when it's cycled somewhere else in the solar calendar in order to make empty gestures to inclusiveness at Islam?)
So take that crankiness and include in it the fact that the solstice is an astronomical term. There are holidays that are keyed off the solstice, but they are not the solstice itself; the solstice is a fact of orbital geometry. The holiday mush is infuriating enough without having science treated as malleable mush.
Personal quirk thing, y'know? I'd still be cranky if they were wishing a happy Yule in the same way, but the crankiness wouldn't be manifesting as impulses to using orreries as torture devices.
Damnit, now I want an orrery again. Heh. A big one. (Shiny brass and stuff! Shiny shiny!) But I got given a sundial! And a book on the ancient Egyptian calendar system to go with it. Expect geeking out in the future sometime.
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Date: 2004-12-28 01:32 am (UTC)Specifically, I'm starting from a place where I'm cranky at the whole mushing together of various holy days into some sort of Christmas-flavored mishmash celebrated on 25 December. I see a lot of stringing-together-holidays without any apparent knowledge or awareness of them. (There are people including Ramadan in their generic-holiday-well-wish-list this year. Ramadan! Which cycles on a lunar calendar. What will they do in a couple of years when it's cycled somewhere else in the solar calendar in order to make empty gestures to inclusiveness at Islam?)
So take that crankiness and include in it the fact that the solstice is an astronomical term. There are holidays that are keyed off the solstice, but they are not the solstice itself; the solstice is a fact of orbital geometry. The holiday mush is infuriating enough without having science treated as malleable mush.
Personal quirk thing, y'know? I'd still be cranky if they were wishing a happy Yule in the same way, but the crankiness wouldn't be manifesting as impulses to using orreries as torture devices.
Damnit, now I want an orrery again. Heh. A big one. (Shiny brass and stuff! Shiny shiny!) But I got given a sundial! And a book on the ancient Egyptian calendar system to go with it. Expect geeking out in the future sometime.