Word: saturnalias
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...repeatedly questioned the ethics of aerospace manufacturers' lavishing free travel and entertainment on military people who control defense contracts. "Neither the aerospace industry nor the military," he wrote, "have exhibited much sense in their blatant exhibitions of how they can squander the taxpayers' dollars in public saturnalia designed to make a pitch for individual service." He has also urged commercial airlines to lower their fares and pay better wages to their maintenance crews. Occasionally a company indignantly pulls its ads; sometimes a disgruntled advertiser complains to Publisher Robert W. Martin
...were only three days off). Peasants in northern Europe decorated their homes with evergreens as a tribute to nature's victory over the numbing winter, held lengthy feasts and processionals. The Romans celebrated' the entire winter solstice season to honor Saturn, the god of agriculture. During the Saturnalia everyone ate, drank and exchanged presents in one long bacchanal. When the Christian missionaries began to comb the countryside for converts, they found that few were willing to give up their pagan rites. Figuring that pragmatism was called for, they combined the two holidays into the mixture of religious...
...Bertolt Brecht. In a music-hall saturnalia of honky-tonk pianos, white masks and silent movie captions, the late great German playwright fashioned a prophetically dramatic exercise in brainwashing. "One man is no man," comments Playwright Brecht in this mocking, 20th century lament for the death of the individual...
...what they want, after all, is the pleasure of giving, a tradition and a need that is older than Christendom. Pagans celebrated the winter solstice with bonfires to strengthen the sun in its course, exchanged wreaths and candles and crowded their streets in noisy processions. The Romans celebrated the Saturnalia (Dec. 19-25) by giving presents to the poor and in return received garlands, tapers or grains of frankincense. On the Kalends of January (Jan. 1-3), Roman men gave one another "honeyed things" to ensure a year of sweetness, lamps to symbolize light and warmth, and money, gold...
Christians are old hands at this kind of syncretism; the Christmas celebration is an absorption of the Roman festival of the Saturnalia. D.T. Niles, 53, general secretary of the East Asia Christian Conference and top spokesman for the Asian churches, put it neatly: "The Christian Gospel is a seed. If you sow it, you get a plant. The plant will bear the mark of both the seed and the soil. The trouble with the missionaries was that they brought Christianity to us as a potted plant. Now we are breaking the pot and putting the plant in our own soil...