Word: saturnalia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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EXHIBIT C: Tyrone Hayes' flamboyant outfit would have been well suited to the rock-'n'-ready atmosphere of New York's Danceteria. Sporting a Prince coif and pointy, sparkling shoes, the crowning jewel of Hayes' snazzy saturnalia was a pair of unlinked handcuffs, which he wore as arm bracelets...
Christmas Trees: The "tannenbaum" finds its roots in the evergreens used for winter solstice festivals to show that life survives even in the cruelest seasons. The Egyptians erected green date palms indoors during their winter solstice rites; the Romans hung trinkets on pine trees during the Saturnalia; the druids placed candles, cakes and gilded apples in tree branches as offerings...
...Roman Saturnalia, these revels were explosions of license and merry-making, and featured drinking and debauchery, houses decked with laurels and evergreens, feasting, bonfires and an exchange of presents. Christian missionaries, finding that they could not get converts to refrain from the festive activities, pleaded with Rome to give the festivals a Christian excuse. In 352 A.D., Pope Julius I decreed Christmas December...
Although the Church intended only to retain pagan forms, it had a difficult time restraining the pagan spirit. Despite clerical protests and papal anathemas, Christmas in the early days preserved many of the worst orgies, debaucheries and indecencies of the Bacchanalia and Saturnalia. The clergy itself was whirled into the vortex, instituting a Feast of Fools so that "the folly which is natural to and born with us might exhale . . . once a year...
...prescribed ceremony or routine usually with religious overtones. In the most provocative section of American Patriots. Shaw analyzes how the rituals of colonial society--paramount among them local celebrations of religious and secular holidays--might easily have been converted to revolutionary purposes. Such celebrations, particularly the annual Saturnalia, featuring mock overthrows of legitimate and illegitimate rulers, expressed, says Shaw, a profound ambivalence toward authority. While stating that the highly moral and serious-minded leaders of the revolution were not caught up in this almost sensual form of protest, Shaw does suggest that "their strength derived from the popular rehearsal...