by Roseanna White | Dec 1, 2014 | Holidays, Word of the Week
Thought I’d go Christmasy for December. =) So today’s Word of the Week is less a word and more the etymology of a story. Because my kids asked me, after I went through the original St. Nicholas story with them, when Rudolph came about, and I had no clue.
As it turns out, our beloved reindeer was an invention of a writer named Robert L. May, who was hired by the Montgomery Ward company to create an original piece of work for their annual children’s coloring book. May devised Rudolph in 1939…to some opposition. The publishers didn’t like the red nose idea. Red noses were associated with drunkards, which certainly wasn’t the image they wanted to portray. But when May had his illustrator friend create a cutesy deer character with a beaming red nose, the powers that be relented–and the story took off to amazing success. The original poem was written in the meter of “The Night Before Christmas.”
The song we all know and love was written a decade later, by the author’s brother-in-law. It remained the all-time best selling album in the country until the 80s!
The stop-motion animation version that I grew up thinking was the only Rudolph story worth watching, LOL, came about in 1964. Though very popular, this movie apparently doesn’t stick very accurately to the original poem. Which now makes me want to look up the original and see what’s been changed!
So there we have it. Our history of Rudolph. =)
by Roseanna White | Dec 16, 2013 | Holidays, Word of the Week
|
| Christmas throughout Christendom, 1873 |
I thought it would be fun to examine some Christmas traditions this week and next. So while this isn’t exactly etymology, it’s still looking at origins. 😉
The legend of mistletoe goes all the way back to Norse mythology. Baldr, grandson of Thor, had a troubling dream in which all living things were trying to kill him. His wife and mother saw how troubled he was by this and so went out to procure promises from all living things that they would not injure their beloved Baldr. They got these promises from everything from oak trees to cows…but not from the mistletoe. Some stories say they overlooked it, others that it seemed too young to give such promises. Whatever their reasoning, they failed to get its word–and then an arrow made of its stem pierced Baldr and killed him.
Mistletoe, therefore, became a reminder to remember and treasure what one loves, hence why couple kiss under it.
In Celtic traditions, mistletoe was considered a sacred plant, symbolic of fertility. The reasoning actually gets a bit explicit, but suffice it to say that this culture also held it as holy, and when Christianity spread, they integrated it into the Christmas tradition.
Kissing under mistletoe has been around for longer than we can accurately say, referenced in some European writings as early as the 17th century. The first English mention of it seems to be in the 1820s, though the mention implies it’s a longstanding tradition.
Whatever its origins, it’s always been a popular one, with young couples quite eager to lure a special someone under the berries and greens. And I daresay few care too much about why they’re doing it, LOL.
Hope everyone is enjoying the Christmas season!
by Roseanna White | Dec 10, 2012 | Holidays, Word of the Week
|
| 1922 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal |
I remember, as a child, writing stories and assignments for school around this time of year and occasionally using the abbreviation “X-mas” for Christmas. I remember teachers telling me not to use abbreviations in my assignments, and I remember someone else (can’t recall who) telling me not to use that one for Christmas because it just wasn’t right to take Christ out of Christmas (or something to that effect) and replace it with an X.
So in my middling years, I refused to use it, thinking it somehow mean to Jesus…then later I actually learned where it came from.
Pretty simple, really. The Greek word for Christ is Χριστός. You might notice that first letter. Our X, though it’s the Greek “chi.” No paganism here, no dark, dastardly scheming to remove Jesus from his birthday. Scholars started this as a form of shorthand. The first English use dates to 1755 in Bernard Ward’s History of St. Edmund’s College, Old Hall. Woodward, Byron, and Coleridge, to name a few, have used it to. And interestingly, similar abbreviations date way back. As early as 1100, the form “Xp̄es mæsse” for Christmas was used in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
So. It’s still an abbreviation and oughtn’t be used in formal writing and more than w/ or b/c, but it’s also perfectly legitimate as what it is. Always nice to discover something like that. =) And I hope as everyone gears up, they have a truly wonderful one! I’m happy to say we survived the crazy Nutcracker weekend around here. 😉
by Roseanna White | Dec 19, 2011 | Holidays, Word of the Week
In Old English, Christmas day was called geol (not to be confused with gaol, which is jail–ha ha ha), taken from Old Norse jol. Jol was a heathen feast day, taken over by English so long ago that no one’s sure exactly when it happened. Though we do know that “jolly” comes from jol. 😉
Origianlly, geol, or yule, meant solely Christmas Day. It also happens that there was a cognate, giuli, that was the Anglo-Saxon name for a two-month midwinter season of feasting, so the two got mixed together. When English first borrowed the word, it meant the 12 Day Feast of Christmas–December 25 through January 6, the Epiphany. It was largely replaced by the word Christmas by the eleventh century, except for in Danish-settled parts of England.
Writers, however, revived the word in the 19th century to capture the particular charm of Christmas in Merry Ol’ England. Oh yes, it’s always the writers, LOL.
Yultide (literally yule time or Christmastime) was recorded in the 15th century, and the first written mention of the yule log is from the 17th century and was a ceremonially chosen log (sometimes and entire tree) picked to have an enduring burn for Christmas.
Can you believe there’s less than a week until Christmas?? I hope everyone is enjoying this yuletide season!
~*~
And today I’m on
Go Teen Writers! It was a fun interview, so be sure to check it out to learn what I would do if captured by kidnappers. 😉
by Roseanna White | May 30, 2011 | Holidays, Word of the Week
No thought at all went into selecting this week’s word. =) Given that today is Memorial Day and all, here we go!
Memorial. Memorial is a word straight from the Latin memoriale, so it’s been in English approximately forever. Since the late 14th century it’s been used exactly as it’s used now – something by which a memory is preserved.
But the interesting thing is in Memorial Day. It’s been used generically, as any day of memory, since the 1830s. But after the Civil War it became a national holiday to commemorate the fallen Northern soldiers. It started unofficially in the 1860s and became recognized by veteran groups in 1869.
I don’t know about you, but I didn’t realize it was a Civil War thing! Pretty interesting.
So, everybody have big Memorial Day plans? My family is combining the M-Day picnic with my grandmother’s b-day party. So in honor of that, I made this cake, which I’m calling my Hydrangea-in-a-Basket cake. =)
Hope everyone has a fun, relaxing, rejuvenating holiday, and that we use it to memorialize those who have fought and fallen for our wonderful nation.
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.