Orts #957
— Santa is a Psychedelic Mushroom—
https://aeon.co/videos/are-mushrooms-shamans-and-ancient-rituals-at-the-root-of-the-santa-claus-story
— a Santa classic —
https://youtu.be/2KNGhf6aMs4
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— two gems for Hanukkah —
http://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/dining/bureka-pastries-congregation-or-veshalom-hanukkah.html
https://youtu.be/LslsgH3-UFU
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Once our forebears learned to farm, they planted and harvested at the equinoxes, but it was the solstices that caught their attention. The extremes. They watched their days shrink from the bright abundance of high summer to the bleak, dark cold of winter, and they invented rituals to make sure the light would come back again: to bring the new day, the new year, the rebirth of life.
The rebirth rituals have become traditions we still celebrate, whether or not we remember where they came from. Some of them are so old that only their monuments remain. On the morning of the winter solstice at the great earthwork Newgrange, in County Meath, Ireland, the day’s first beam of sunlight shines in through a passage that Neolithic people built there five thousand years ago to catch it, and for seventeen minutes, a dark room deep within is filled with the sunshine of the shortest day.
-- Susan Cooper, The Shortest Day
https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/12/03/the-shortest-day-ellis-cooper/
or is it a fake? is nothing sacred?
https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/is-newgranges-solstice-light-show-fake
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Happy Solstice To All, And To All A Good Night