Mysteries of Christmas

Mysteries of the navidad and the solstice of Winter. A lot before the coming of the Christianity, the plants and trees that remained green the whole year they had a special meaning for people during the winter. People of the antiquity hung up paths of everlasting flowers, plants of perennial sheets, in their gates and windows. In many towns it was believed that they withdrew witches, phantoms, bad spirits and illnesses.

In the Celtic culture, the festivity of the winter solstice received the name of Yule. Yule designates the moment in that the wheel of the year is in its lower moment, prepared to ascend again. In Scandinavia the tradition existed of celebrating Yule with dances and parties. A pig was also sacrificed in honor of Frey, god of the love and the fertility that it controlled the time and the rain according to the belief. During the festivity of Yule it was traditional to burn the trunk of Yule, a long tree trunk that went afire slowly during the whole season of celebrations, in honor of the birth of the new sun. Of that tradition the pastries proceed in trunk (trunks of chocolate) form that nowadays eat up in Christmas.

The old ones Celtic they believed that the tree represented a power, and that that power protected and he/she helped to the tree. The sacred forests served like temple to the German ones. For the Gauls, the oak was a tree sacred envelope the one that the druidas, priests Celtic guardians of the traditions, picked up the mistletoe following a sacred rite. This tradition, inherited through the centuries, it served as inspiration for the current tree of Christmas.

In the North hemisphere, the shortest day and the longest night in the year he/she falls the 21 or 22 of December and it is known as winter solstice. Old many civilizations believed that the Sun was a god and that the winter it arrived every year because that he/she got sick and it weakened. They celebrated the solstice because it meant that the god Sun finally began to be alleviated. The greenery of the sheets of everlasting flowers reminded them that all the plants would grow again when the god Sun was strong and he/she returned the summer.

The old Egyptians adored to the god Ra who had the head of a hawk and it used in the sun as a radiant disk in their krona. In the solstice, when Ra began to recover of the illness, the Egyptians filled their houses with green buds of palm that symbolized for them the victory of the life about the death.

The first Romans marked the solstice with a called party Saturnalia, in honor of Saturn, the god of the agriculture. They knew that the solstice meant that soon the farms and orchards would be green and full with fruits. To point out the occasion, they decorated their homesteads and temples with paths of everlasting flowers.

In the North of Europe, mysterious Druidas, the Celtic priests of the old ones, also decorated their temples with paths of everlasting flowers, as a symbol of the eternal life. The ferocious Vikings from Scandinavia thought that the everlasting flowers were the special plants of the god Sun, Balder.

He/she is allocated Germany the started book credit the tradition of the tree of Christmas. It was during the century Sixteen that the devote Christian began to arrange trees decorated in their homesteads.

It is believed that Martin Lutero, the Protestant reformer, was who first arranged power on candles to a tree. It counts the legend that, walking to house a winter night, it was surprised by the brilliance of the stars, flashing among the near trees. To reproduce the beautiful scene to their family, it arranged a tree in the main room of the house, it installed him/her wires in their paths to sustain power on candles and he/she said that it would be a symbol of the Christmas beautiful sky.

Another legend says that people from Germany merged two customs that had been practiced in different areas of the world: the tree of the Paradise, a fir decorated with apples that it represented the tree of the Knowledge in the Garden of the Paradise and Luz of Christmas, a frame in a pyramidal way, usually decoration with glass realms, tinsel and a candle in the tip that was the symbol of Christ's birth like Luz of the World.

Changing the apples of the tree for tinsel realms, adding cookies of diverse physiques and merging this new tree with Luz arranged in the tip, the German created the tree of Christmas that we know now, called Tannenbaum.