It Seems Like Yesterday. Where Did That Time Go Anyway?

“Time moves in one direction, memory in another.” – William Gibson

Why does time seem to speed up as we get older?  When we were 8 years old, Christmas took forever to get here as we anxiously anticipated our Christmas gifts. Then, somehow, we got to “It’s Christmas already? Again?” Of course, objectively, we know that a year always takes the same 365 days to pass (except on a leap year, of course), and that each of those days contains the same 24 hours. Yet we also know that this is not at all how it feels. I would note, however, that no matter what our age, summer always goes too quickly. We also realize that some things that we think are older occurred at the same time as things we think are older still. Did you know that woolly mammoths were still alive while Egyptians were building those pyramids?  

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana” ……Groucho Marx or Anthony Oettinger.

Why is it that some things that happened years ago seem like yesterday, while other things get lost in the past? Yes, why is it that time seems to pass faster as we get older? Why do our brains warp the perception of time based on circumstances and subject matter? If you have time on your hands, there are several theories.

Adrian Bejan, a researcher at Duke University suggested that our perception of time changes due to physical alterations in our brains and bodies as we age.  Why do some days feel longer or shorter than others? And why does time seem to fly by as we get older? One explanation is “clock time” vs. “mind time” According to Bejan, there’s a distinction between measurable clock time and the time perceived by our minds.  “The measurable ‘clock time’ is not the same as the time perceived by the human mind. The ‘mind time’ is a sequence of images, i.e., reflections of nature that are fed by stimuli from sensory organs.” In other words, our brains process a series of mental images based on what we see, hear, and experience. When we’re young, our brains receive and process these images more rapidly. As we age, this processing slows down due to physical changes like the degradation of neural pathways. 

We all know that when you are at work nothing ruins a Friday more than realizing it’s actually Tuesday. 

Cindy Lustig, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan pointed out that as we age, our lives often become more routine. “When we are older, we tend to have lives that are more structured around routines, and fewer of the big landmark events that we use to demarcate different epochs of the ‘time of our lives”. With fewer new experiences, our brains lump similar days and weeks together. This can make time feel like it’s passing more quickly because there are fewer memorable events to distinguish one period from another.

Psychologists have been noticing this feature of the human mind, and have been forming theories about its origins, since psychology began as a discipline. In 1890, William James wrote in his classic text, Principles of Psychology  that this speeding up is probably responsible for the phenomenon which came to be called  “forward telescoping”: our tendency to think that past events have happened more recently than they actually have. For example, Anne Frank, Martin Luther King Jr., Audrey Hepburn, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Grace Kelly and Dick Clark were all born in 1929. The telescoping effect refers to inaccurate perceptions regarding time, where people see recent events as more remote than they are (backward telescoping), and remote events as more recent (forward telescoping). This mental error in memory can occur whenever we make time-based assumptions regarding past events. The Brooklyn Bridge is 11 years older than London's Tower Bridge.

 “The past always looks better than it was. It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.” — Finley Peter Dunne

It is a short jump (time warp?) from your brain and biology and our perceptions of time to physics. Enter Albert Einstein who believed time is relative and developed his special theory of relativity, Einstein said that time depends on the observer's reference frame. We know that time is the same no matter where we are. “Not so fast” said Einstein although he probably said “Nicht so schnell.”  It depends on our reference point. In 1905, Einstein took a tram ride home and instead of reading a newspaper or checking his social media, he realized something that revolutionized modern physics. While receding away from the Zytglogge (a Clock Tower) in Bern, Switzerland, he imagined what would happen if the tram was zooming along at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second). He realized that at such great speed, the hands of the clock would appear to be completely stationary. However, he knew that back at the clock tower, the hands would tick at their normal pace. He recognized that when he travels fast, time will slow down. He concluded that the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. Einstein proved that time is relative depending on its observer, rather than an immutably fixed constant everywhere in the universe.

 The idiom, “Time flies when you’re having fun” is mistakenly attributed to Einstein but it was in a 1785 play, Love’s Last Shift by William Congreve. We would add to time flying and fun that when you’re procrastinating, time flies even faster! Although Einstein did say, 'Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. ...”

And so that is why we know that 30 minutes is 30 minutes except the 30 minutes you get to lie in bed before getting up and starting the day goes a lot quicker than the 30 minutes waiting at the airport as the plane is delayed or at a boring meeting or lecture or cocktail party or your wife/husband et al, makes you watch the Hallmark Channel Christmas in July. Time can be your friend or your foe. The clock plays an important role. As for age, it is a simple fact that for a 10-year-old, one year represents 10 percent of their entire life and even 15 to 20 percent of their conscious memory. But one year for a 50-year-old represents less than 2 percent of their recallable life. Thus, we have those long days in school and almost endless summers of childhood, and the rapidly transitory days, weeks, and months that most of us adults experience. 

Of course there is what is known as the Time Paradox.  My General Practitioner and my Gastroenterologist are a paradox, well they are a pair a Docs anyway.  But we digress. As an example, take the twins Pierre and Marie. Their clocks will remain in sync, and they will age in unison as long as they are in close proximity to one another. However, things would be slightly different if Pierre were to board a rocket and travel through space at almost the speed of light to the Andromeda Galaxy. His voyage may have lasted merely a few months or several years. But for Marie, it might have taken decades or even centuries, depending on how quickly he moved. There is a good chance that when Pierre returns from Andromeda, Marie will be kaput.  Science Fiction writers get orgasmic over this idea. This is precisely what the laws of special relativity require: based on their velocity, various observers in the universe would calculate time differently.

 “Time is a game played beautifully by children.” – Heraclitus

From physics we return to our brains and biological theories. One is that the speeding up of time is linked to how our metabolism gradually slows down as we grow older. Because children's hearts beat faster than ours, because they breathe more quickly and their blood flows more quickly, their body clocks "cover" more time within the space of 24 hours than ours do as adults. Then there is the proportional theory, which suggests that the important factor is that, as you get older, each time period constitutes a smaller fraction of your life as a whole. Mind time and clock time are two totally different things. They flow at varying rates. This theory seems to have been put forward in 1877 by Paul Janet, who suggested the law that  William James describes as, "the apparent length of an interval at a given epoch of a man's life is proportional to the total length of the life itself. A child of 10 feels a year as 1/10 of his whole life — a man of 50 as 1/50, the whole life meanwhile apparently preserving a constant length."

“Time moves slowly but passes quickly.” –Alice Walker.  

Writer Philip Yaffe suggested the speed of time as we experience it has to do with anticipation and retrospection. We cannot wait to graduate from high school or college, and it can be an agonizing process at times. Yet, at the ten-year class reunion we cannot believe it was that long ago. Children and teenagers experience significantly more change, more frequently, than adults. They grow taller, wear new clothes, switch schools, have different friends, and learn new things, good and bad, at school. It is a world of transition and change. As adults, many of these factors level out and don't change at all. As we get older, our brains aren't wired to take in as many things from the outside world, or to learn in the same way. Therefore, three years ago can feel like yesterday: not much has changed in our brain, our perception, or our lived experience. Take Harriet the Tortoise for example. She died in 2006. She had seen Charles Darwin in person.  Harriet was collected by Darwin during his 1835 visit to the Galápagos Islands as part of his round-the-world survey expedition. She was then transported to England, and then brought to her final home, Australia, by a retiring captain of the Beagle. When Harriet was attacked by a gang of snails, the police asked her what happened. She said, “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.” 

Adding to the historical perspective goolash, in today’s digital age, excessive use of social media can also distort our sense of time. When we dive into our favorite apps, we’re met with an endless stream of posts, videos, and updates that continuously stimulate our senses.  Blackberries have come and gone for goodness’s sake. So has Twitter. Misjudgments in time stem from our tendency to assess remembered events by how long ago it feels they occurred rather than a deliberate calculation. Although it’s easier to spot these memory mix-ups in other people, they’re not always easy to detect in ourselves.

There are also physical changes in the aging brain. Our friend Bejan emphasized that these physical changes in our brains contribute significantly to this altered perception. “The rate at which changes in mental images are perceived decreases with age because of several physical features that change with age: saccades (a rapid movement of the eye between fixation points) frequency, body size, pathways degradation, etc.,” As our neural pathways degrade over time, our brains take longer to process new information. This slower processing speed means we’re generating fewer mental images in the same amount of clock time, making time seem to pass faster.  Look at 1977, the year our son was born.  Charlie Chaplin died in 1977, the same year Apple was incorporated. It was also last use of the guillotine in France, and the same year Star Wars came out. Seems like yesterday to us. 

“Time flies over us but leaves its shadow behind.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

So, we continue to wonder why is it that some things that happened years ago seem like yesterday, while other things seem lost in the past? And why is it that time seems to pass faster as we get older? Why does it seem that our brains warp the perception of time based on circumstances and subject matter? Questionnaires by psychologists have shown that almost everyone — including college students — feels that time is passing faster now compared to when they were a fraction as old. And perhaps most notably, a number of experiments have shown that, when older people are asked to guess how long intervals of time are, or to ‘reproduce' the length of periods of time, they guess a shorter amount than younger people. Your children are about to finish school when it doesn't seem long since you were changing their diapers.  

Go back 10 years from your current age.  Could it seem like yesterday?  Ask a 25 year old to back 10 years.  9/11 will be ancient history to Gen Zers while it is etched in the memory of those of us over 40. 2020 and Covid is recent for all of us.  It will be history in 10 years for a 15-year-old. Perhaps in 100 years people will look on it the way we look on the Spanish Flu of 1919. Of course, that depends on how many new diseases the Chinese develop in their labs in the interim. 

I remember exactly where I was when John F. Kennedy was shot, I was taking a French test. I recall where I was when Neil Armstrong said, “The Eagle has landed” (Castle Douglas Scotland).  However, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was recent for my parents but ancient history to me. They knew exactly where they were. In fact, my father remembered being at a N.Y Giants football game when it was announced on Sunday, December, 7 1941. Pick a major historical occurrence during your life.  One generation’s current event is another generation’s history.   Just ask the Baby Boomers, Millennials, Generation X and Generation Z about the past.  My friend, Jerry, will occasionally call out “Babalu !”  when someone hits a very long golf shot. He did this one day when we were teamed with a 21-year-old. The Gen Zer said “what’s Babalu?”.  Jerry explained that it was from the TV show, I Love Lucy.  The 21-year-old said, “what’s that?”.  Each generation gives birth to their own cultural sayings, mostly so they can identify with each other, but also so that they can confuse previous generations as to what the meaning is …. Babalu!  As the Who informed us, we’re, “talkin’ ‘bout my generation.”  A reminder,  Idioms will come and go but idiots will always be with us.  

Speaking of the moon landing, Cleopatra lived 69 B.C.–30 B.C. and that first moon landing was in 1969, A.D.…which means Cleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid. Our perceptions can enable the past to fool us. 

“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,                                                                                                        I summon up remembrance of things past”

Shakespeare, Sonnet XXX

• ·      William Shakespeare was still alive while America was still being colonized 
• ·      Harvard University didn't offer calculus classes for the first few years after the school was established in 1836.... because calculus wouldn’t be invented for another 30 years. 
• ·      In 1889 Nintendo was founded when Jack the Ripper was still practicing his surgical skills on live women. Nintendo originally made playing cards called hanafuda.
• ·      Today's oldest living tree (a bristlecone pine) was already 1,000 years old when the last wooly mammoth died
• ·      "Buffalo Bill" Cody was still alive during WWI. 
• ·      Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire
• ·      The first book of the New Testament, the Epistle of St. Paul - 1 to the Thessalonians was written 16 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. The first Gospel, Mark was written about 30 years after Jesus died.
• ·      Between the time it was discovered and the time it was “deplaneted”, Pluto did not even complete one revolution around the sun. Revolve in peace Pluto.
• ·      Jurassic Park baloney, the difference in time between when Tyrannosaurus Rex and Stegosaurus was 85,000,000 years. That’s greater than the difference in time between Tyrannosaurus Rex and now.
• ·      And the next time you say you’ll be a “moment,” know that it is actually is a medieval unit of time and is equal to 90 seconds.

“Old age and the passage of time teach all things.”…..Sophocles    

We know and even occasionally understand, that the concept of time involves biology and physics and memory.  Yesterday becomes recent. Recent becomes “then”. Then turns into history. And history becomes “where did the months/years go?”.    This will be the same for everyone regardless of age.  Gen Zers and those yet to be named “Gens”  to follow just like Baby Boomers and those that preceded will also wonder, “Is it Labor Day already?” We all know that children grow up too all too quickly.  Some events will disappear from our memories. Cultural references and idioms (“Babalu”) will become disused and antiquated and forgotten except for those contemporaries who remember and continue to use them to the confusion of a younger generation.  Recall, the last original episode of Seinfeld aired on May 14, 1998. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”  Time is an amazing and fascinating phenomenon. It is a fundamental quality of the universe along with the three known spatial dimensions: length, width, and height. It can also be a pain in the posterior.  The chronological passage of the hours, days, and years on clocks and calendars is a steady, measurable phenomenon. Yet our awareness of time shifts constantly, depending on external factors such as seasons, holidays/vacations, birthdates, anniversaries or physical changes such as wrinkles…..I’ll stop there. These will affect the perceived passage of time in minutes, days, hours, weeks and especially years. Now you know why we wonder where the time went yet we’ll  never stop wondering where it went.   But it sure has gone, hasn’t it? 

“Time and tide wait for no man…….Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales.

 

Sources:

https://qz.com/1516804/physics-explains-why-time-passes-faster-as-you-age

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/think-well/202011/why-time-goes-faster-we-age

https://brainworldmagazine.com/time-flies-growing-growing-older-perception-time/

https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/telescoping-effect

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/46978/20231108/time-relative-meaning-why-albert-einstein.htm

Time Picture - https://www.shutterstock.com/search/clock-with-wings?dd_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

 

 

 

Why Is Christmas Celebrated on December 25? (mostly)

 

 

 

 The above question may have occurred to many of us at one time or another so the Editorial Board of the Gnus Almanac, decided to do a  bit of research.  The Bible offers a few clues.  

Celebrations of Jesus’ Nativity are not mentioned in the Gospel of Mark or the Epistles of Paul, or Acts.   The date is not given nor is the time of year. The biblical reference to shepherds tending their flocks at night when they hear the news of Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:8) might suggest the spring lambing season while in the cold month of December, on the other hand, sheep might well have been corralled.  Still, most scholars remind us that we are extracting a precise but incidental detail from a narrative whose focus is theological rather than calendrical. 

There is not much extra-biblicaly (our term) either.   Evidence from the first and second century is, surprise, fairly sparse. There is no mention of birth celebrations in the writings of early Christian writers such as Irenaeus (c. 130–200) or Tertullian (c. 160–225). Origen of Alexandria (c. 165–264) went so far as to mock Roman celebrations of birth anniversaries, dismissing them as “pagan” practices which is a strong indication that Jesus’ birth was not marked with similar festivities at that place and time. As far as we can tell, Christmas was not feted at all at this point although there are rumors of Black Friday sales events, Amazon Prime Days, and the annual trampling of Walmart employees.

Jesus’ ministry, miracles, Passion and Resurrection were what interested first- and early-second-century A.D. Christian writers.  But over time, Jesus’ origins would become of increasing interest. This shift can be seen in the New Testament.  The earliest writings—Paul (Epistles)c. 48-64 AD and Mark c. 70 AD make no mention of Jesus' birth.  However, the Gospels of Matthew – c. 66–70 AD, and Luke  c.85–90 AD, provide well-known but quite different accounts of the event—although neither specifies a date. In the second century further details of Jesus’ birth and childhood were related in apocryphal writings such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas c. 180 AD, and the Proto-Gospel of James c. 145 AD. These texts provide everything from the names of Jesus’ grandparents to the details of his education……..but not the date of his birth. 

Finally, in about 200 A.D., a Christian teacher in Egypt made a reference to the date Jesus was born. According to Clement of Alexandria, several different days had been proposed by various Christian groups. Surprising as it may seem, Clement doesn’t mention December 25 at all.  Clement wrote “There are those who have determined not only the year of our Lord’s birth, but also the day; and they say that it took place in the 28th year of (the emperor), Augustus.  (Augustus became Emperor in 27 B.C so that would put the year of Jesus’ birth at 1-3), and in the 25th day of (the Egyptian month) Pachon (May 20 in our Gregorian calendar]) … Another school of thought says He was born on the 24th or 25th of Pharmuthi (April 20 or 21). Glad we could clear that up for you. “Why a child of four could understand this.  Someone fetch a child of four”………..Groucho Marx. 

Obviously, there was great uncertainty, but also a considerable amount of interest, in dating Jesus’ birth during the late second century. Within a hundred years, however, we find references to two dates that were widely recognized—and now also celebrated—as Jesus’ birthday: December 25 in the Western Roman Empire and January 6 in the East (especially in Egypt and Asia Minor). The modern Armenian church continues to celebrate Christmas on January 6. For most Christians, however, December 25 would prevail, while January 6 eventually came to be known as the Feast of the Epiphany, commemorating the arrival of the magi in Bethlehem.  The period between became the holiday season later known as the 12 days of Christmas, which is all the more reason for 12 drummers drumming, not to mention a partridge in a pear tree.  

The earliest mention of December 25 as Jesus’ birthday comes from a mid-fourth-century Roman almanac that lists the death dates of various Christian bishops and martyrs. The first date listed, December 25, is marked: natus Christus in Betleem Judeae: “Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea.” In about 400 A.D, St. Augustine mentioned a local dissident Christian group, the Donatists, who apparently kept Christmas festivals on December 25.  So, almost 300 years after Jesus was born, we finally find people observing his birth in mid-winter. But how had they settled on the dates December 25 and January 6? There are two theories.  The first is extremely popular, while the other is less often heard outside scholarly circles, though far more ancient.  

The most common theory about the origins of the Christmas date(s) is that it was borrowed from pagan celebrations.   The Romans had their mid-winter Saturnalia festival in late December; barbarian peoples of northern and western Europe kept holidays at similar times. To top it off, in 274 B.C the Roman emperor Aurelian established a feast of the birth of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun), on December 25. Christmas, the argument goes, is really a spin-off from these pagan solar festivals. According to this theory, early Christians deliberately chose these dates to encourage the spread of Christmas and Christianity throughout the Roman world. If Christmas looked like a pagan holiday, more pagans would be open to both the holiday and the God whose birth it celebrated. But………………this theory of Christmas’s origins has its problems. Christian authors of the time do note a connection between the solstice and Jesus’ birth.  St. Ambrose (c. 339–397), for example, described Christ as the True Sun, who outshone the fallen gods of the old order. Early Christian writers never hinted at any recent calendrical engineering, and they clearly didn’t think the date was chosen by the church. Rather they saw the coincidence as a providential sign, as natural proof that God had selected Jesus over the false pagan gods. So where did the “let’s connect to pagan feasts” idea come from?   In the 12th century, a marginal note on a manuscript of the writings of the Syriac biblical commentator Dionysius bar-Salibi stated that in ancient times the Christmas holiday was actually shifted from January 6 to December 25 so that it fell on the same date as the pagan Sol Invictus holiday.  In the 18th and 19th centuries, Bible scholars inspired by the new study of comparative religions latched on to this idea.  They claimed that because the early Christians didn’t know when Jesus was born, they simply assimilated the pagan solstice festival for their own purposes, claiming it as the time of the Messiah’s birth and celebrating it accordingly. Et voila! So we have a supposition built on a marginal note in an obscure book equals popular theory. More recent studies have shown that many of the holiday’s modern trappings do reflect pagan customs, but they were incorporated much later as Christianity expanded into northern and western Europe. The Christmas tree, for example, has been linked with late medieval druidic practices. This has only encouraged modern thinkers to assume that the date, too, must be pagan. 

The other theory accounting for December 25, dates Jesus’ birth from the date of his death during Passover.  This idea was first suggested by French scholar Louis Duchesne in the early 20th century and later fully developed by American Thomas Talley.  But they were certainly not the first to note a connection between the traditional date of Jesus’ death and his birth. Jesus’ conception carried with it the promise of salvation through his death. It may be no coincidence, then, that the early church celebrated Jesus’ conception and death on the same calendar day: March 25, exactly nine months before December 25.  Around 200 A.D. Tertullian of Carthage reported the calculation that the 14th of Nisan (the day of the crucifixion according to the Gospel of John) in the year Jesus died was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman (solar) calendar. Again,  March 25 is, of course, nine months before December 25; it was later recognized as the Feast of the Annunciation—the commemoration of Jesus’ conception. Thus, Jesus was believed to have been conceived and crucified on the same day of the year.  Exactly nine months later, Jesus was born, on December 25. This idea appeared in an anonymous Christian treatise titled On Solstices and Equinoxes, which came from fourth-century North Africa. The treatise stated: “Therefore our Lord was conceived on the eighth of the kalends of April in the month of March (March 25), which is the day of the passion of the Lord and of his conception. For on that day he was conceived on the same he suffered.” 

Based on this theory, the treatise dates Jesus’ birth to the winter solstice. Augustine, who was from North Africa, was familiar with this association. In On the Trinity (c. 399–419) he wrote: “For he (Jesus) is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also he suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which he was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which he was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before him nor since. But he was born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th.”   

And there you have it. 

Ultimately, December 25 was chosen, perhaps as early as A.D. 273. By 336 A.D., the Roman church calendar definitively records a nativity celebration by Western Christians on this date.  Eastern churches maintained the January 6 commemoration together with Epiphany until sometime in the fifth or sixth centuries when the 25th day of December became the widely accepted holiday. Only the Armenian church held to the original celebration of Christ's birth with Epiphany on January 6. 

A third theory is that December 25 was chosen so that 20th and 21st century advertisements and commercials could feature snow. 

The actual term Christmas appeared in Old English as early as 1038 A.D. as Cristes Maesse, and later as Cristes-messe in 1131 A.D. It means "the Mass of Christ." This name was established by the Christian church to disconnect the holiday and its customs from pagan rites probably because of St. Augustine’s statement, "We hold this day holy, not like the pagans because of the birth of the sun, but because of Him who made it." 

A few centuries ago Christmas was not the peaceful, yet hectic, busy and occasionally stressful  family holiday we know today. Back then, Christmas' proximity to Saturnalia resulted in it its absorbing some of the Roman festival's excesses such as a carnival-like period of feasting, reveling, gambling, gift-giving and upended social positions. Enslaved people could don their masters' clothes and refuse orders and children had command over adults. Christmas in the Middle Ages featured feasting, drinking, riotous behavior and caroling for money. There would be a reaction. Religious Puritans disapproved of such excess in the name of Christ and considered the holiday blasphemous. Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, went so far as to cancel Christmas when he seized control of the country in 1645. Decorations were forbidden and soldiers patrolled the street in search of celebrants cooking meat. Those happy go lucky Puritans in the American colonies took a similarly sour view of Christmas as Yuletide (note: Yule comes from the Norse December season), festivities were outlawed in Boston from 1659 through 1681. It took a hundred years or so for things to calm down during the late 18th century and continuing throughout the 19th century. Christmas began to take on the family associations it has today. In the U.S, Washington Irving (he of Legend of Sleepy Hollow fame), wrote popular stories about Christmas that appropriated old traditions, presenting them as the customs for the common people. Queen Victoria's German husband, Prince Albert, brought a Christmas tree to Windsor Castle in 1846. An engraving of the couple with their children in front of the tree popularized the custom throughout England and the United States.

Christmas has also become a secular celebration of family — one that many non-practicing Christians and people of other religions are comfortable accepting as their own. This secular nature of Christmas was officially acknowledged in 1870 when the United States Congress made it a federal holiday. 

Merry Christmas.  It’s a great day and a great celebration.

 

Sources - Biblical Archaeological Society, Christianity, About.com – Mary Fairchild, ChristianHistory.net -Elesha Coffman,  

How Christmas Works - Sarah Dowdey