Thursday, November 18, 2004

christmas, gift giving and non-christians
My life is full of pondering these days.
Today's first thought to ponder: Why do we give gifts at Christmas? An overview of the history of the tradition can be found here.
Those darn Victorians with their silly games:

The Victorians surrounded the act of gift giving with a great deal of ingenuity and merriment: simply tearing into a cache of wrapped boxes would have been to miss the point. Far more thought and preparation than that were in order during the holiday season. They had cobweb parties, which was a lot of messy fun. Each family member was assigned a color, then shown to a room crisscrossed with yarn of various colors. Each person was to follow an assigned color through the web of yarn until he or she reached the present tied to the end.