Christmas Day!!

Its Christmas Day!!! Well, it's not exactly as exciting out here as I am writing it out to be although I really loved the decorations of one of the houses in the neighbourhood. The way that it glowed in the night was simply magnificent and I could not help but take a snap.But other than that,far away from home and without any real friends and family the holidays are a real bore out here.But still while everyone else was asleep in my apartment last night,I sat waiting for Santa to turn up and give me some gifts but considering I had no socks to leave in the gifts and the fact that I am not exactly a kid,so he promptly gave this poor house a miss!! I tried several things to get the time to pass. I tried writing some codes of SAS, a statistical software that I am trying to learn, but soon gave up on that finding it too complicated. Then I tried playing some games on my laptop. I was in the final showdown of NFS Undercover which I was finding very difficult to complete the other day. I was sure that it would take atleast another hour of my time and leave me exhausted enough to fall to sleep but surprisingly I managed to finish the game in the first try itself (and they say that miracles don't happen in christmas any more!!). That left me again with some time on hand, finding no other worthwhile thing to do I cooked myself few sandwiches and settled back on my bed with a Coke which had Santa gracing its cover. It was then I thought that since I had nothing else to do why not just try to find out what this Ho Ho Ho(my love for puns always continues!!)is all about. OK, everyone knows that this is the day that Jesus was born and the custom of the gifts probably started because of the three wisemen, the magi who brought gifts for the little Jesus, but was that all?? Here was what I found out!!
Christmas actually stands for “mass on Christ's day” and the word is probably derived from the Germanic jōl or the Anglo-Saxon geōl, which referred to the feast of the winter solstice. It may be difficult to believe but in the first two centuries the celebration of christmas was looked down upon because of the belief that saints and martyrs should be honoured on the days of their martyrdom—their true “birthdays,” rather than their actual birthdays. How did December 25 come about to be as the day that Jesus was born? Again, very surprisingly, the bible has no mention of this at all and this date was identified by Sextus Julius Africanus only in 221.One widespread explanation of the origin of this date is that December 25 was the Christianizing of the dies solis invicti nati (“day of the birth of the unconquered sun”), a popular holiday in the Roman Empire that celebrated the winter solstice as a symbol of the resurgence of the sun, the casting away of winter and the heralding of the rebirth of spring and summer. A second view suggests that December 25 became the date of Jesus' birth by a priori reasoning that identified the spring equinox as the date of the creation of the world and the fourth day of creation, when the light was created, as the day of Jesus' conception (i.e., March 25). December 25, nine months later!!While finding all this information really left me overwhelmed and drained but I just managed to find another interesting tidbit about Santa Claus just before I slept. The actual image that we associate with Santa came into being as early as 1931 by illustrator Haddon Sundblum who designed it for the Coca Cola campaigns!!
So as one of the most boring christmas comes to an end for me with the long boring week ahead I still can say that this christmas did leave me 'enlightened'!! ( I really am turning into some form of master of puns these days! )