Talk:Winterval

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17th Dec 05. Edited African American to Afro-Caribbean, because using a US-centric term in an article about an event in Birmingham, England is remarkably stupid and blindly PC.

LOL, that's just ludicrous. There are people out there who think every black person is American? That's not even PC, it's a cocktail of ignorance and arrogance.

I'd also like to know why New Year's Day is a "specifically Christian" tradition. If there's no backup for this it needs rephrasing.

Presumably because it uses the Christian calendar, though there's never been anything religious about New Year. Mon Vier 23:38, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

New Year is Christian because the years being counted are those since the birth of Christ (2006 is theoretically 2005 years after the birth, with year 1 beginning at the moment of his birth). If you go to countries which have no Christian tradition, they often have a completely different system for counting years (obviously the period of time it takes to go round the sun is always roughly 365 days, but the starting point of a year and the number of years counted are both completely arbitrary). Admittedly, there is an inconsistency about celebrating the birth on the 25th December but the new year on the 1st of January, really they ought to be on the same day if they're both meant to be anniversaries of the same event, but they're so close together that no one really pays it much attention. Originally these mid-winter festivals were pagan and somewhat hijacked by the church, and the real birth of Christ (if it happened) probably occured earlier in the year.

[edit] Wintervali

I have this year seen the term Wintervali used to include the Hindu Diwali in the Winterval portfolio. Lumos3 12:12, 9 January 2006 (UTC)