Quiz: Why is it Twelve Days of Christmas?

Yesterday’s Answer below: Is the origin of the word potato French, Spanish, Gaelic, or American Indian?
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History for 12/24/2012
Birthdays:, Roman Emperor Servius Galba, English King John Lackland, Revolutionary Patriot Dr Benjamin Rush, Kit Carson, Howard Hughes, Ava Gardner, Michael Curtiz, I.F.Stone, Robert Joffrey of the Joffrey Ballet, Mean Joe Green, John Matusak, Susan Lucci, Nicholas Meyer, Ricky Martin is 43, Ryan Seacrest

The religion that was runner up to Christianity in the ancient world was the Sun God Mithras. In it, today was celebrated as the birth of Mithras, who was conceived of a virgin, born in the wilderness to be adored by shepherds. Hmmm…?

In the Middle Ages this was the Feast of Saints Adam and Eve. The western theatrical tradition survived in the form of Mystery Plays, acting out stories from the Bible. So this day they would do a play about the temptation and expulsion from the Garden of Eden. A tree was brought into the church and decorated to represent the Tree of Life, glass balls representing the fruit. This is one of the origins of the Christmas Tree. The Feast of Adam and Eve was dispensed with during the Reformation.

1247- Sir Robin of Loxley, called Robin Hood, died. Legend has it that he fired an arrow out his window with instructions to bury him where it fell.

1294- Benedict Gaetani elected Pope Boniface VIII. Boniface felt the Roman pontiff was above any other earthly crown so much that he made the triple tiara the Popes are crowned with. The hat that looks like a big gold hairdryer. Dante hatred Boniface so much in his poem Inferno he has two devils stirring a cauldron of boiling lead and calling up :"Hey Boniface? When are you coming down? It’s just about ready!"

1652- In England the Puritan Parliament of Oliver Cromwell forbade any celebration of Christmas. Their brethren the Puritans of Massachusetts would arrest anyone found making merry and fine them three shillings. But after the restoration of King Charles II the partying came back.

1740- In Pope’s Creek Va, A fire burns out the home of Augustine and Mary Ball Washington. This included little 8 year old child, George Washington.

1783 - the American Revolution concluded, General George Washington arrived home at Mt. Vernon :" The scene is at last closed. I feel myself eased of the load of public care."

1799- After seizing power in France in a military coup 31 year old General Napoleon Bonaparte invented an executive system for the French republic based on an interpretation of the ancient Roman Republic. Nostalgia for classical art and themes were all the rage then. Napoleon makes himself First Consul. He promised to share power with two other consuls in a rotation, Sieyes and Carnot. He never did. He became Emperor of France in 1804.

1800 - Going to the theater Napoleon was almost blown up by a bomb planted in a wagon near his carriage. The terrorist was a royalist named Jean Carbonis. In a sick twist Carbonis gave the reins of the booby-trapped horse & wagon to a little peasant girl to allay suspicions of the police. Napoleon was safe but 22 others including the little girl were killed. Carbonis was arrested and shot.

1801- Richard Trevithick created a three wheeled vehicle powered by a big steam boiler and drove 7 people down a road in Cornwall England. He couldn’t steer it very well and it hit a wall at barely two miles an hour.

1814- U.S. and Great Britain sign the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812. John Quincy Adams headed the American negotiation team. The British had demanded a independent Indian buffer state in the Great Lakes between the US and Canada, and the US demanded the Pacific Northwest, but all they got was the status quo before the war started. The news wouldn't get across the Atlantic for two months and in the meantime Americans and Englishmen would murder each other one last time at the Battle of New Orleans (Jan 8th).

1818-the song Silent Night first sung at the Church of Saint Nicholas in Obersdorf, Austria. It’s lyrics were written by the minister named Josef Mohr and music by a teacher named Franz Gruber.

1862- Near Mufreesboro Tennessee Confederate guerrilla Col. John Hunt Morgan took advantage of the Christmas truce to get married. The ceremony was conducted by Confederate General Leonidas Polk, who was an ordained Methodist Bishop. Both men would not survive the Civil War.

1865- THE KU KLUX KLAN BORN. Before the Civil War white plantation owners rode together at night to patrol their fields catching runaway slaves. After the South’s defeat, in Pulaski Tennessee in the law offices of Thomas M. Jones some disaffected Confederate veterans formed a secret society of night riders.

They named it based on the Greek letter fraternities just gaining popularity in universities- Kappa-Alpha or Kuklos Adelphon.- Kuklos meaning Circle. There was also a version that it came from a lost Indian tribe called the Kawklats. It corrupted into the Ku Klux Klan.

They donned white sheets and hoods to portray themselves as the avenging ghosts of dead rebel soldiers. They played up the mystical images to terrify the superstitious-Grand Wizards, Cyclops. Ghouls. The first Grand Wizard was General Nathan Bedford Forrest, but he resigned after he felt their violence had become counterproductive. There is a hotly disputed version that the Klan first offered their leadership to Robert E. Lee. He declined in a letter, but suggested they should be an "Invisible Empire". After Congress outlawed them in 1871 the Invisible Empire went underground to thwart reconstruction and Black Civil Rights.

1888- Vincent Van Gogh cuts off a piece of his left ear after an argument with fellow artist Paul Gaugin over the affections of a prostitute named Rachel. He sent his ear to the prostitute. She fainted. Recent scholarship theorizes his ear was sliced off by Gaugin waving an antique sword.

1889- Daniel Stover & W. Hance of Freeport Ill. invented the bicycle backpedal brake.

1922- The BBC presented it’s first radio play:" The truth about Father Christmas."

1934-GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR DUMPED HIS GIRLFRIEND-For two years the divorced general had kept a beautiful young Eurasian mistress he met in Manila. But when he accepted the posting back in Washington she insisted on coming with him. Today he sent an aide to intercept her in the lobby of the Willard Hotel in Washington and buy her off with a newly minted sheet of 100 dollar bills. His chief reason for giving her the boot was the 54 year old four star general was afraid his mother would find out.

1941- General Homma and the advancing Japanese Army capture the Philippine capitol Manila. General MacArthur withdrew to the island fortress of Corregidor, while his exhausted Philippine-American troops set up a last line of defense on the Bataan Penninsula.

1941- Operation Drumroll. German Admiral Doenitz dispatched advanced 5 long range U-Boats to attack ships off the American East coast.

1942- Admiral Darlan assassinated. Darlan was a Vichy-Nazi collaborator who the Allies had to cut a deal with so the Vichy French wouldn't fight the Allied landings in North Africa at Casablanca. Having to be nice to this turncoat disgusted Free-French like Charles DeGaulle and apparently disgusted somebody even more...

1944- In some of the last big V-1 attacks on London the Nazis added a sick twist- they filled the buzz bombs with letters home from British POWs. As the bombs exploded in Oldham and Gravesend killing women and children, the letters blew out like confetti.

1951- Gina Carlo Menotti’s opera "Amal and the Night Visitors" premiered on NBC TV..

1952- Congress overturned Harry Truman’s veto the McCaren /Walters Immigration Act. It called for more strenuous screening of immigrants for Communist sympathies, but it also redistributed the quota system along more racist lines. Two thirds of the slots allowed for new immigrants to America went to England, Ireland and Germany with the rest of the world getting one third. The objectionable parts of the act were changed in 1965,…. they said.

1952- First draft script completed on the MGM film Terror Planet, changed to “ Forbidden Planet.”

1964- First day shooting on the “Cage” a pilot for a new TV show called Star Trek. Jeffrey Hunter was the first captain, later replaced by William Shatner when Hunter’s wife advised him to skip the series. She was worried he’d be typecast.

1966- Local New York City TV station WPIX premiered The Yule Log. They ran a loop of 6 minutes of a closeup of a log burning in a fireplace in Gracie Mansion. The loop ran from 11:00PM to 1:00AM with Christmas carols playing. It made the TV the metaphorical family hearth. New Yorkers loved their kitschy Yule Log tradition and when WPIX tried to replace it in 1989 hundreds of complaints forced them to put it back the following year. The log was taped once more in 1970, and that’s been the film ever since.

1968- Apollo 8 went into orbit around the Moon. Astronauts Jim Lovell, Frank Borman and William Anders become the first men to reach the moon and win the Space Race. They orbited but did not land, that was for Apollo 11 next year. Borman sent a message to Earth Christmas night by reading from Genesis as they sent back the first images of Earth, a little blue gem in a black cosmos: "And God said: Let there be Light, etc." To a world traumatized by the riots, wars and assassinations of 1968, Apollo 8’s message ended the year on a positive note. That humans could still dream to be better than they were.

1968- Twentieth Century Fox announced that legendary Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa had been fired from the production of TORA-TORA-TORA. Producer Darryl Zanuck’s original concept was the story of the Pearl Harbor attack told by Kurosawa from the Japanese side and David Lean from the American side. But Lean passed and Richard Fleischer stepped in. Japanese sections were directed by Toshio Fukusaku and Masuda, whose previous credit was The Green Slime.

1985- Fidel Castro gives up smoking cigars, on doctors’ orders.

1990- Tom Cruise married Nicole Kidman.

1992- Outgoing President George H. W. Bush Ist announced Presidential Pardons for all the former Reagan Whitehouse staff implicated in the Iran Contra Scandal. Caspar Weinberger, Bud McFarlane and probably himself.

1997- The first Hanukkah menorah lit in Vatican City.

1997- 62 year old Film director Woody Allen married 27 year old Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his former lover Mia Farrow. When asked to explain himself the director said: " The Heart wants what it Wants.."
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Yesterday’s Question: Is the origin of the word potato French, Spanish, Gaelic, or American Indian?

Answer: It is an Taino Indian word batata, called by the Spanish patata.