# "That" Day is Here



## Squint-eyed Southerner (Oct 30, 2019)

How should we make it special?

Hmm... What about. . .


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## Erestor Arcamen (Oct 31, 2019)

Be in front of your TV sets for the horrorthon, and remember the big giveaway at 9. Don't miss it, and don't forget to wear your masks!


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## Olorgando (Oct 31, 2019)

You're both talking about some heathen Celtic feast that was "Christianized" in Ireland, then vulgarized in the name of commerce in the US (I'm thinking Coca Cola's "Santa Claus"), and has since maybe the beginning of this millennium been foisted via blatant advertising on any country that does not respond with overt terrorism?


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Oct 31, 2019)

Nope -- guess again!


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## Olorgando (Oct 31, 2019)

Olorgando said:


> You're both talking about some heathen Celtic feast that was "Christianized" in Ireland, then vulgarized in the name of commerce in the US (I'm thinking Coca Cola's "Santa Claus"), and has since maybe the beginning of this millennium been foisted via blatant advertising on any country that does not respond with overt terrorism?





Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> Nope -- guess again!


Channeling Dick Nixon again: "Let me make this perfectly clear …"
Coca Cola's "Santa Claus" is a far more ancient "Christianization" of the Roman Saturnalia festivities. I only mentioned it as an example.
I'm talking, in longhand, about "All Hallows Eve" … 🤨

For German Protestants, today is Reformation Day, Martin Luther, the church in Wittenberg, the 95 theses and all that.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Oct 31, 2019)

Well, doesn't that sound fun!


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## Olorgando (Oct 31, 2019)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> Well, doesn't that sound fun!


I do not have the foggiest idea either way … 🤔


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## Alcuin (Oct 31, 2019)




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## Alcuin (Oct 31, 2019)

I lived in Salem, Massachusetts, 28 years. When I left, I’d been there exactly half my life. There are witches there and a satanic temple. Christians are under “un”official pressure by the local politicians to “conform” and “get along”, to not “make waves”.

Driving through town throughout the month of October is all but impossible. On Halloween, the little city swells to four or five times its normal population. We lived in a quiet, safe neighborhood where everyone knew his neighbors; on Halloween, though, drunken and drug-ridden people would walk down the street howling and barking like animals at 3 in the morning. One Halloween, there was a fight one street away, across from a neighborhood store, and an out-of-towner stabbed another out-of-towner nearly to death.

The Salem Witch Trials may have been driven by silly tales told by a woman named Tituba to a group of suggestive, pre-pubescent girls. Some investigators now think the hysteria was driven by an outbreak of ergot in the wheat supply: the summer had been unusually cold and wet. But everyone agrees that much of the terror was spread by greed: one group of families attacked another by charging them with witchcraft. If you confessed, your life was spared, but they seized your property; if you pled innocence, they executed you. One man, Giles Corey, refused to plead, jamming the judicial system. He was “pressed” to extract a plea: placed on the ground between two doors with heavy stones piled upon the door on top until he died. His last words gasped out were, “More stones!” During the ordeal, he cursed the sheriff of Essex County and the chief judge. The chief judge died of a pulmonary hemorrhage the following year, blood pouring out his mouth. For the next 300 years, every single sheriff of Essex County died in office of a cardiac or circulatory ailment until 1992, when the incumbent finally survived his term of office – after suffering a severe heart attack at his desk.

Finally someone accused the wife of the governor of witchcraft. Increase Mather, then president of Harvard, wrote a defense of the governor’s wife, _Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits_ that includes the famous dictum, “It were better that ten suspected witches should escape, than that one innocent person should be condemned,” whence comes the Anglo-American rule of jurisprudence, _It is better that ten guilty men should be acquitted, than one innocent person be condemned._ This was the first contribution of the colonies to the common law of the mother country, where King James I (VI) had begun the witch hysteria almost a century before. The increasing rejection of that dictum belies the present rot in our judicial system.

Witch hysterias were not confined to the English. The worst outbreaks were in Germany, where I understand that after many burnings at the stake, the corners of some buildings in town squares were covered in human fat. Nor were these fears entirely unjustified: in the sixteenth century, Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory believed she could maintain her youth and beauty by bathing in the blood of virgins, and so murdered perhaps as many as 700 young women before she was caught and imprisoned. A century before that, Vlad II, Prince of Wallachia, better known as Vlad Dracul (“son of the Dragon”: he was a member of the Order of the Dragon), was infamous for his heavy-handed rule, murdering intransigent boyars and impaling Ottoman prisoners by the hundreds, perhaps thousands, while dining among the dead and dying. (He is considered a hero in Transylvania.) And unfortunately, tales of vampires existed for centuries throughout central Europe as a result of conflicts between Catholic and Orthodox Christian priests who sought to terrify the newly-converted inhabitants into choosing one rite over the other.

Nor did I believe in haunted houses before I moved to Salem as an adult. I do now. People toying with this stuff are playing with fire, more foolish than children playing with electricity, and far more deadly.

My wife and children love Halloween. I hate it.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Oct 31, 2019)

The "Movies!" channel is running a Hammerfest tonight:








Movies! Schedule






moviestvnetwork.com


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## CirdanLinweilin (Nov 1, 2019)

Olorgando said:


> Channeling Dick Nixon again: "Let me make this perfectly clear …"
> Coca Cola's "Santa Claus" is a far more ancient "Christianization" of the Roman Saturnalia festivities. I only mentioned it as an example.
> I'm talking, in longhand, about "All Hallows Eve" … 🤨
> 
> For German Protestants, today is Reformation Day, Martin Luther, the church in Wittenberg, the 95 theses and all that.


Santa Claus is a secularization and bastardization of a Catholic Saint.



Peasant.



CL


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## CirdanLinweilin (Nov 1, 2019)

Alcuin said:


> A century before that, Vlad II, Prince of Wallachia, better known as Vlad Dracul (“son of the Dragon”: he was a member of the Order of the Dragon), was infamous for his heavy-handed rule, murdering intransigent boyars and impaling Ottoman prisoners by the hundreds, perhaps thousands, while dining among the dead and dying. (He is considered a hero in Transylvania


He saved europe from the women hating barbarian sex crazed Ottomans in my eyes.


CL


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## CirdanLinweilin (Nov 1, 2019)

I should say I am Catholic, by the way....

OKAY! Back to Tolkien!!





CL


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Nov 1, 2019)




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## CirdanLinweilin (Nov 1, 2019)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> View attachment 6161


YES!



CL


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Nov 1, 2019)

Which?


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## CirdanLinweilin (Nov 1, 2019)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> Which?


Ol' Farmer Maggot getting boo'ed by a Greedy slavish King slave of Sauron.


CL


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Nov 1, 2019)

I mean, trick? Or treat?


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## CirdanLinweilin (Nov 1, 2019)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> I mean, trick? Or treat?


Well, in the Ringwraith's case: TRICK!


CL


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## Olorgando (Nov 1, 2019)

CirdanLinweilin said:


> Santa Claus is a secularization and bastardization of a Catholic Saint.


Yes, Saint Nicholas of Myra, whose feast day is on 06 December. Coca-Cola's "Santa Claus" is not only all you have described, but has also been moved to be involved in the gift-giving on early Christmas Day (he's starting to run out of chimneys in modern housing). In Germany "Das Christkind" (the Christ child) is the bringer of gifts, which are traditionally given on 24.12. Christmas Eve, not 25.12. First Christmas Day. I write First because 26.12. is Second Christmas Day in Germany. But Christmas is one of the most ancient "Christianizations" of a "heathen" festivity, as I mentioned above, it was timed to coincide with (and supersede) the Roman Saturnalia.

I'd be very hesitant to characterize him as a Catholic Saint, especially with any implication of exclusivity. The Catholic Church may have also acknowledged him, but from what little is known of his history he was certainly not a "Latiner", and the Eastern Orthodox Church most certainly has the much stronger claim on him.

The memories I'm dredging up now are easily 55 years old and more, so it could get dusty. But I remember two occasions, one in Germany, another in India (dimmer) which must have been a gathering of the local German expatriate community. At least for the occasion in Germany, I remember St. Nicholas and his helper "Knecht Ruprecht" (placing this in north and central German traditions, southern Germany has other names for his helper or helpers) arriving at a festivity held at the sports club both of my parents were members of. That helper was nominally, in contrast to St. Nicholas, who gave the presents and praised the well-behaved children, supposed to give the less well-behaved ones a little spanking with his bundle of twigs. I don't remember it happening then (certainly not to me), but in times when my parents (born in the 1920s) or grandparents (born in the 1890s) were children, I can imagine actual spankings happening.😭


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## Olorgando (Nov 1, 2019)

CirdanLinweilin said:


> Well, in the Ringwraith's case: TRICK!


But oh boy, did the ever regret "ringing the doorbell at Rivendell", so to speak. 🤣


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## CirdanLinweilin (Nov 1, 2019)

Olorgando said:


> But oh boy, did the ever regret "ringing the doorbell at Rivendell", so to speak. 🤣


Yep! XD





CL


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