Starship Asterisk*

When nights are darkest and days most dark; when the sun seems farthest from the planet and cheers it with lowest heat; when the fields lie shorn between harvest-time and seed-time and man turns wistful eyes back and forth between the mystery of his origin and the mystery of his end,--then comes the great pageant of the winter solstice, then comes Christmas.

So what is Christmas? And what for centuries has it been to differing but always identical mortals?

[size=110][b][i]JAMES LANE ALLEN ON “THE FUTURE CHRISTMAS”:[/i][/b][/size] Author of [b][i]“The Bride of the Mistletoe”[/i][/b] Traces Festival to Remote Pagan Past and Pictures Its Development Through the Ages. [url=http://www.sundaymagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/19101225-3-james.pdf][b][i]The New York Times Sunday Magazine (1910 Dec 25)[/i][/b][/url]

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James Lane Allen On “The Future Christmas” (2010 Dec 24)

Although the headline suggests the article is all about the future, in fact novelist James Lane Allen gives a detailed history of Christmas. He focuses on the symbols we associate with the holiday — the tree, Santa, etc — and explains their Pagan origins. He then speculates that in the future, Christmas will again be celebrated as a ritual worshiping nature. He doesn’t say exactly when this will happen, so there’s still time for his prediction to come true.

James Lane Allen wrote a story that uses on the Pagan roots of Christmas as a theme. It’s called The Bride of the Mistletoe and can be read free here at Project Gutenberg