Merry Christmas!

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For my Russian, Greek and other Orthodox friends – best of the holiday season. (Nashville has a large group of Copts. I have fond memories of the blue
[See the full post at: Merry Christmas!]

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columbia2011, Nibbled To Death By Ducks, lurks about, Fred, Noel Carboni, jburk07, JDeC, Cascadian, SueW, Elly, BobbyB, AJNorth

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” It’s an amazing, diverse, fascinating world we live in.”

It is indeed (and is our strength)!

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Fred, woody, Cascadian, SueW, Elly, BobbyB

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Diversity is an amazing strength. As a global community we are blessed with a very wide range of innumerable different attributes. We have relearned several times the most productive use of that strength comes from reducing the inherent entropy. When diverse peoples start pulling in the same direction the results are stunning.

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woody

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As a Greek-American, I thank you but when I was young, I was given the impression that the majority of Greek Orthodox Christians followed the Gregorian calendar, not the Julian.

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woody

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That may well be the case. Any other Greeks in the audience?

I have a couple of good friends who are Russian. Siberian, actually. And I know of a few Coptic Christians nearby. They all celebrate January 7 – in addition to December 25. Lucky kids get everything twice.

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I have not traveled widely, so my comment is admittedly USAmero-centric. I have noticed that in different places and at different times we have described immigrant assimilation as a melting pot or a stew pot. The first suggesting that different backgrounds create a new, stronger whole that is different than either was before. The second suggests that the whole is more enjoyable when the component ingredients remain faithful to the background that came with them.

Not advocating one over the other, flipped a coin to decide which to name first. Just observing that there have been different experiences in adapting to the new home in the US.

edit to change a redundancy to my intended words.

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In Canada we’ve long referred to the changing ethnic makeup of the country as a cultural mosaic, a mix of ethnic, cultural and language groups that coexist in society. It’s intended to suggest a form of multiculturalism in which differences are welcomed and appreciated, as opposed to the assimilation/melting pot approach in the United States. I don’t know that it always works as smoothly as we would like or pretend, but we’ve had official government departments and policies to foster multiculturalism since the early 70s. Not saying it’s better or worse than how other countries deal with population change, but it works for us IMHO.

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BobbyB, Cascadian

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As a native Greek living most of my life in Greece, I can confirm that Greek Orthodox Church follows in general the Gregorian calendar, and hence Christmas was two weeks ago. On the other hand, Easter and its related dates are accordning to the Julian calendar similarly to the rest of orthodox people.

Tryfon

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Cascadian

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The Greek Orthodox use the civil (Gregorian) calendar for fixed dates (Christmas, Theophany, etc.). For Pascha (Easter) the Julian calendar is used to determine the date and the dates show as the start of Lent, Holy Week, Palm Sunday, Ascension, etc.

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There are these Wikipedia articles (which, like all Wikipedia articles that aren’t deemed good articles, should be taken with a grain of salt):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Calendarists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Old_Calendarists

One of the external links shown under the first of the articles above:
https://orthodoxwiki.org/Old_Calendarists

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I saw the headline and for the briefest moment I thought AskWoody had crashed and lost a bunch of posts.

LABS - a family friendly webcomic about scientists, robots and Wisconsin

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MrBrian, woody

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You weren’t the only one! LOL

Non-techy Win 10 Pro and Linux Mint experimenter

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woody wrote:

For my Russian, Greek and other Orthodox friends – best of the holiday season. (Nashville has a large group of Copts. I have fond memories of the blue [See the full post at: Merry Christmas!]

amazing cultures, the socalled west may learn from the old traditions and civilisations

* _ ... _ *

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…and let’s not forget that many in The Commonwealth (and in many parts of the Spanish-Speaking World)  just celebrated Twelfth Night:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Night_(holiday)

The scene in a western English town I have friends in is truly wonderful.  Special dishes, parties, songs, a version of a pub crawl where one grabs one’s friends, gets free (warm!) beer for performing a silly play, wearing outlandish costumes, chalking the beams of the establishment, and rolling on to the next stop…

Needless to say, one does NOT call on the telephone until well past noon the next day!

Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Dell Latitude E6330 ("The Tank"), Intel CORE i5 "Ivy Bridge", 12GB RAM, Group "0Patch", Multiple Air-Gapped backup drives in different locations. Linux Mint Newbie
--
"The more kinks you put in the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the pipes." -Scotty

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Elly

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