Christmas Update

Authors: Ben <benk@tilde.team>

Dated: 2020-12-24

A gemlog post in two parts.

Gemlog Software Update

So it's been a while since I updated my gemlog, and I figured since tomorrow is Christmas I would go ahead and do that. As coincidence would have it, there was a while there where I couldn't update it because of an Ocaml build error. One of the libraries Logarion depends on got updated and for some reason they broke compatibility. I waited a couple weeks maybe for Logarion to maybe get updated to fix this issue, but instead I was recommended to downgrade the package, which is totally fine.

A partial rewrite is being planned for Logarion, and one of the features in new Logarion is to remove dependency on that library, so it doesn't make sense to update that. The plan is to have it soon smoothly exporting Markdown content for serving over various protocols and formats like Gemini, Gopher, and HTML.

Recently I was contacted by the guy behind Gmisub asking if I could make some small changes to the gemlog so that posts could be aggregated by it. I'm surprised I didn't know about it before:

gemini://calcuode.com/gmisub-aggregate.gmi

Apparently it follows a standard that is somehow already associated with the Gemini spec, which is something I also did not know:

gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/companion/subscription.gmi

The basic idea is that pages all have a # title and the index page is a list of links whose descriptions start with the YYYY-MM-DD date followed by their title. Assuming you've met these criteria, your gemlog is ready for aggregation.

I think this is a great facility because I'm not really a big fan of using RSS or Atom on Gemini. I like the idea that someone could just sit down and write a gemlog by hand without the help of special software.

Regardless, I even wrote a small bash script last night that generates a basic gemlog. Actually don't know why I did this, but it was fun. I'll just drop the code here just because:

It's far from perfect as it just barely gets the job done, but that keeps it simple. Obviously, I don't know how to code properly in shell scripts. The script assumes you already have an index file with three lines it, otherwise it won't update. It also assumes everything is in the current directory, which can be fixed with a couple more lines.

One thing about it I kind of like is the decision to put hours and minutes in the filename so you could write multiple posts in a single day without filename collision. Would be nice if something like Gmisub could also pick up on that, as the subscription model has the known weakness of not being able to order posts written on the same date. I guess though restricting filenames like that is too restrictive, but I find it very practical. Perhaps a new aggregation standard?

Christmas in Iran

In Iran there's an interesting cultural confluence around Christmas and the winter solstice. The basic timeline works something like this:

In ancient times Iranians observed the winter solstice for some reason. This must have been very common among ancient peoples. The Iranians had the concept of "chila" (or "chelleh") which means a unit of forty. There were basically three special "forty" periods every year: one in the summer, and two in the winter. In winter there is the "big" one that starts on the day of the winter solstice and lasts for forty days, and then there is the "little" one that starts on the last day of the big one and lasts for twenty days and twenty nights (another kind of forty).

I'm not sure why they did this, but maybe one day I'll read more about it. Either it had some kind of special spiritual significance, or it helped them manage their affairs time-wise with respect to the seasons, maybe for livestock or agriculture.

Related to this, since the night of the solstice is the longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere, Iranians developed a tradition of staying up all night and having a fun family gathering. I am also not sure when or how this got started, but it gives me pause to wonder if new year's eve celebrations in modern times bears some relation to that habit.

Without any further information, I wonder if this observance was even originally a fun family gathering, or whether it was a criticial time in ancient religion. I wonder (without evidence) if people used to observe rituals and prayers (or even sacrifices) in order to bring about the end of the long winter nights and the return of spring and summer. Something along the lines of, "If we don't please the gods, the winter won't end." Sort of like, "Without proper prayers the sun may not rise."

Either way, people don't think about those things now. Whether or not chila was originally a celebration for Iranians, it's known that in the first century CE Syriac Christians in the western part of Iran celebrated Christmas, which they called "Yalda", meaning "birth". (Because of the birth of Jesus.) Sometime since, all people in the modern country of Iran refer to the night of the winter solstice as "Yalda".

Iranians today do not know what Yalda means or where the word came from, so they are unaware that their current version of the holiday is related to or influenced by Christianity. It is today one of the most popular holidays in Iran, thought of as a native and "ancient Persian" holiday. Because the society was never Christian, they don't have a reason to associate their celebration with the religion. You could say that it's secular holiday, which can also be said of Nowruz as well, the other, more popular Iranian holiday.

Iranians are also aware of Christmas since it is globally popular. They don't think it's the same thing as Yalda, which is celebrated on Dec 20th, whereas Christmas is widely celebrated on the 25th. Slight difference there, but same festive nature.

To complicate matters further, the ancient Romans prior to Christianity had a religion called Mithraism, which was a cult centered on the Iranian god Mithra. The sticky bit here is that though Mithra was really a god in the Iranian pantheon, it has not been observed that the Iranians ever actually based an entire religion or cult on Mithra like the Romans did. Iranian religion historically was quite different, though the notion that Mithraism is an "Iranian" religion is wildly persistent. (I like to think of it as like whether or not Taco Bell is "Mexican" food.)

This association leads to a favorite passtime of Iranian nationalists claiming that Iranians actually invented Christmas and that Christmas just copies Mithraism from Iran (probably untrue, since Mithraism came from Rome) and that Yalda is the "original", more ancient Christmas (also not true since Iranians literally borrowed "Yalda" from Christians).

Regardless of how they connect, they are connected nonetheless. In the end they are all related to a single phenomenon, the winter solstice. And not only do we have Christmas and Yalda to contend with, we also have the Gregorian new year!

Now, why the year begins on the first of January and not, for example, in late March with the spring, is probably also tied into all this solstice stuff. In the USSR where my wife grew up, because the Soviets tried to do away with Christmas entirely, they made a funny attempt to secularize the holiday by changing it to the new year. That basically means Soviet children all grew up with Santa Claus and Christmas trees, but they were told it's new year's celebration.

Anyway, what am I supposed to do with all these holidays happening within about ten days of each other? Pick one? Celebrate them all? I guess I should just look at it as one holday in multiple parts. Now that we are in COVID lockdown and away from family, there isn't much difference between the twentieth, twenty-fifth, or thirty-first. However, I think this year I will prefer the latter, since then it will be 2020 no more.