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and How We Celebrate Them Today by CLARE WALKER LESLIE and FRANK E. GERACE Inner Traditions $18 (hardcover)
How often we are taught something of history (all together now — who discovered America?) that we must later debunk to see the truth! The more I study, the more I find how little we generally know the "why" of the world we live in, which is so often based on our past. A book like The Ancient Celtic Festivals can help to break this cycle of learning and teaching a biased or simplified history. The book is written for children nine to 12 years old, and the illustrations are very simple, as if appropriate to tell of a simpler time of human life. But the history given is one that treats kids as capable of learning as they really are: it walks the reader through the solar calendar and explains the way of Celtic life and festivals. Along the way, the book shows many of the connections between ancient traditions and much of what we celebrate today. Did it ever seem strange that we celebrate Groundhog Day long before groundhogs emerge from hibernation? (Hint: German immigrants couldn’t find their traditional badger for the job; an old Scottish tradition involving snakes is also implicated here.) May Day, harvest festivals, Halloween, Easter, and more are also discussed, and ideas are given for celebrating these today with the past in mind. I like this book because it teaches kids without dumbing down the history, and at the same time brings history very much into our lives today. I would like to see more books like this available for teaching our kids. |
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It seems more widely recognized all the time that many of the events we celebrate each year are not quite the celebrations they seem, but hearken back to different celebrations of an earlier day. Possibly the one event gaining special notice today as a pagan holiday made Christian is that of Jesus’ birth: Christmas was set at roughly the time of the winter solstice (a celebration of the sun god’s victory over the darkness) to draw pagans into the new religion. But other events have changed with time as well.