People sleep pretty late on Dec 25th and it’s usually pretty quiet with just a big dinner with family. So people use to wish us Happy Birthday and our parents gave us presents but our birthdays were kind of anticlimactic. There isn’t suppose to be any real drinking on Dec 24th but that isn’t always followed and I remember some of the adults getting a bit plastered. So between the sneaking of alcohol and the consumption of vast qualities of cakes, cookies and other food, most people didn’t want to do a whole lot on Dec 25th. People from the United States would find Dec 24 eerily quiet. Few people leave their houses and most churches don’t hold services. The street are empty and all the celebrations are inside the houses. The parties are fun but more subdued and not crazy like the New Year celebrations when the whole country explodes. Giving out Xmas cards is very popular in Iceland and my sister and I use to make our own to give our classmates and family. We got a few birthday cards but most people just wrote happy birthday on the Faith Over Fear T shirt of the Xmas card, sort of an afterthought.

Simon Malls might have learned its own lesson in not disturbing the Christmas peace when it rolled out a new, sleek, almost futuristic Christmas display a few weeks ago at six of its 200 properties. Children could still sit on Santa’s lap as their parents once did. But gone were the elves, trees and other visual cues heralding traditional Christmas, replaced by a new, all-white faux-glacier structure that looked more like it came from the workshop of French designer Philippe Starck than the North Pole. Some customers balked; social media and local TV stations jumped on it; boycotts were invoked, and within days the largest mall owner in the U.S. retreated. “It was our intention to experiment with delivering a modern, interactive experience for the family,” David Contis, president of Simon Malls, said in a statement. “After listening to customer feedback, we immediately decided to reinstall our existing Christmas décor and hope our customers will join us in celebrating the Christmas season.” That Contis uttered the word “Christmas” — and not “holiday” — highlighted the true meaning of this tussle. While America grows more diverse culturally and religiously, and young America grows more agnostic, businesses are struggling with the question of Faith Over Fear T shirt to communicate a single, homogenous message — especially at this time of year.
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Putting financial and stressful pressure on families – together with some children feeling left out when their family cannot afford the presents “santa” brings their friends. The whole meaning of this celebration – forgotten. The UK has researched such pressure for countless at Christmas, stating it now “to be the most stressful time of the year for families”. Christmas has deviated a long way from its simplistic celebration and true meaning. The early church also celebrated Christ’s Resurrection in spring, the season of new life, since it coincided with the Jewish Passover feast on 14 Nisan, a date that depended on when the first full moon occurred in March or April. Many of our Easter symbols, like the bunny and the egg, are ancient fertility pagan symbols; (and also have nothing to do with Good Friday, the death and resurrection of Christ – the central belief of christianity and the reason for Easter and the holiday offered out of respect, contemplation for remembrance of the sacrifice made for us). No one knows how chocolate got dragged in! (commercialised for profit once again – along with hot cross buns I would imagine). The secular “enlightenment” of modern times is losing the true traditional relevance, history and meaning of such seasons turning them into a [[Faith Over Fear T shirt]] making affair.
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Santa Claus was inspired and created by St. Nicholas; – this Christmas tradition has Christian roots, rather than pagan ones. Born in southern Turkey around 280, he was a bishop in the early Christian church and suffered persecution and imprisonment for his faith. Coming from a wealthy family, he was renowned for his generosity towards the poor and disenfranchised. The legends surrounding him abound, but the most famous is how he saved three daughters from being sold into slavery. There was no dowry to entice a man to marry them, so it was their father’s last resort. St. Nicholas is said to have tossed gold through an open window into the home, thus saving them from their fate. Legend has it that the gold landed in a sock drying by the fire, so children started hanging stockings by their fires in hopes St. Nicholas would toss gifts into them. As time went on, each European culture adapted versions of St. Nicholas. In Swiss and German cultures, Christkind or Kris Kringle (Christ child) accompanied St. Nicholas to deliver presents to well-behaved children. Jultomten was a happy elf delivering gifts via a Faith Over Fear T shirt drawn by goats in Sweden. Then there was Father Christmas in England and Pere Noel in France. In the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Lorraine, France, and parts of Germany, he was known as Sinter Klaas. (Klaas, for the record, is a shortened version of the name Nicholas). This is where the Americanized Santa Claus comes from.

One thing I just remembered today was when I was little, we did not have a fireplace in the house that you can see in the picture above. So I would go to the front door, and not only unlock the door, but open it slightly. My parents tried to tell me that when Santa couldn’t find a chimney to come down, he had a master key and came in. But I did not believe them. In my mind I was only slightly taller than the door knob. So I would open the door, and then go to bed. But in the middle of the title after my parents went to bed, I would check the front door. It was always closed, so I opened it again, maybe just 1/2 inch. I would leave the cookies and milk next to a chair right by the door. While there was a storm door, the house would get still get cold, most Christmases were snow free, but still cold in Chicago.