Yes! Their walk across the zodiac was definitely intriguing to our ancestors. However, the Planets, as well, seemed to have a discernible pattern that could be tracked. So, they were mostly dependable and unchanging in their motion.

The Planets' stubborn refusal to be where they were supposed to be is one of the great catalysts of the scientific revolution. Because they moved in ellipses, Kepler, I think, was the first to produce math that would table them correctly.

Ilk is the proper word. Hancock doesn't need to be mentioned in order to discuss the Tepes of Turkey.

It was definitely the science that proved science itself had to have a methodology outside religious thought and that it needed something besides logic to solve discrepancies. Galileo pushed for that ... and won, eventually.

That constancy of the heavens is something I think we take for granted. Before Galileo and his work to improve the telescope, the heavens were seen as immutable: unchanging. It's difficult to imagine how odd it must have been to see changes happen before the telescope. Most of those would have been temporary, such as comets and nova changes to brightness. They would have really seemed like messengers.

Wow! Thanks for the downlow!

They were fine with a surplus of food being stored. They didn't like the revelry associated with winter excess. Supposedly, winter was a time of low work requirements in agriculture. The crops were brought in and you had a good understanding of how much food you had to last you through the winter. A dependable excess meant you could party. Slaughter was traditionally done when temperatures dropped to preserve meat. You either ate it or salted it. Eating fresh meat was preferred. Beer and wine were also supposedly ready in December, though I don't know why?

December was a time to gorge.

Puritans did not like the excess and drunken revelry as a custom.

I think there are a bunch of chapters, right? Used to go to one in Oakland. Thanks for keeping old traditions going!

You'd love the Christmas Revels album. "The boars head in hand bear I, bedecked with sage and rosemary!"

The book goes into a lot of class warfare and how Christmas was traditionally a time when peasants would remind land holders of their tenuous hold on power.

There's a really interesting book which delves into the "roots" of Christmas called The Battle for Christmas by Nissenbaum. It doesn't focus on the ancient or Medieval origins of Christmas, but the evolution of Christmas as a thing that was wholly torn apart during the rise of Puritanism. Ancient customs associated with harvest and winter larders were wiped away by a Christian ethic of temperance. Basically, they wanted drudgery without punctuation and saw winter celebrations as drunken revelry... which it was, but they didn't see the need for it.

If you want to kind of get an inkling of those older traditions, you can kind of hear it in albums like The Christmas Revels: In Celebration of the Winter Solstice.

I say, kind of hear, because a lot of those traditions were wiped away and we have to reassemble them. It's not exactly the same, but it's kind of like Pacific Islanders having to reassemble their language and traditions after the colonial period tried to scour it away.

Anyway, the book explains how the Christmas we know today... the Victorian, Dickensian Christmas was, oddly enough, a product of Dickens coming to America and his readings of Washington Irving (who also kind of invented Halloween). The traditions in a Christmas Carol aren't invested in Christian imagery. They are invested in a type of pagan tradition that Dickens assembled or invented.

So, in the end, the hard to define element of Christmas might actually owe a lot to the murky nature of the traditions themselves.

Edit: Also, Christ's birthday was one of the few events which didn't seem to have an associated date which lined up with the Jewish calendar and Holidays so it was easy to assign to the Solstice celebrations.

Same issue here. How did you adhere the magnets to the metal. I was thinking of doing this.

I salivate over these Nicks customs that remind me of Docs I had in high school: https://www.reddit.com/gallery/xxedeg

I didn't know anything about lacrosse until I heard they recently bought Whites boots in 2022.

Edit: No, sorry. Whites has been owned by LaCrosse. More research needed.

Okay, LaCrosse owns Danner and Whites boots and has since 2014.

I'm not sure it's in Cosmos, but his speech on humility is one of the best logical arguments for the existence of extra terrestrial life even though it doesn't really mention it at all. It's subject is our insignificance. As Webb begins to capture the chemical signatures of exoplanet atmospheres it should give us patience to know that NOT finding life elsewhere would be completely contrary to every great demotion we've experienced so far:

https://youtu.be/o8GA2w-qrcg

Also, The Frontier is Everywhere:

https://youtu.be/oY59wZdCDo0

When he mentions that it will not be we who reaches alpha centauri but a species very like us with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses, it makes me gasp.