The red costumed, white bearded charicature of St. Nich that we are most familiar with is also not pagan but commercial. This particualr imagery was invented by Coca Cola.

I say: Kill Santa, eggnog, shopping, reindeeer & Christmas trees. We need to drive secularism out of the Christian home and the church.

There’s nothing wrong with multiple names for things, like Holy Week versus Passiontide, Christmas versus “Feast of the Nativity” and so on.

Lent is another English-only name that we have no plans to change to “40 days season” or something more international.

So whoever Eostre may have been, she was a goddess with a limited base, and the “Easter is really a pagan festival taken over by the Church” is not terribly accurate.

To quote the good old Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913:

“The English term, according to the Ven. Bede (De temporum ratione, I, v), relates to Estre, a Teutonic goddess of the rising light of day and spring, which deity, however, is otherwise unknown, even in the Edda (Simrock, Mythol., 362); Anglo-Saxon, eâster, eâstron; Old High German, ôstra, ôstrara, ôstrarûn; German, Ostern. April was called easter-monadh. The plural eâstron is used, because the feast lasts seven days. Like the French plural Pâques, it is a translation from the Latin Festa Paschalia, the entire octave of Easter. The Greek term for Easter, pascha, has nothing in common with the verb paschein, “to suffer,” although by the later symbolic writers it was connected with it; it is the Aramaic form of the Hebrew pesach (transitus, passover). The Greeks called Easter the pascha anastasimon; Good Friday the pascha staurosimon. The respective terms used by the Latins are Pascha resurrectionis and Pascha crucifixionis…The Romance languages have adopted the Hebrew-Greek term: Latin, Pascha; Italian, Pasqua; Spanish, Pascua; French, Pâques. Also some Celtic and Teutonic nations use it: Scottish, Pask; Dutch, Pasen Danish, Paaske; Swedish, Pask; even in the German provinces of the Lower Rhine the people call the feast Paisken not Ostern. The word is, principally in Spain and Italy, identified with the word “solemnity” and extended to other feasts, e.g. Sp., Pascua florida, Palm Sunday; Pascua de Pentecostes, Pentecost; Pascua de la Natividad, Christmas; Pascua de Epifania, Epiphany. In some parts of France also First Communion is called Pâques, whatever time of the year administered.”

And there is material available out there to research this stuff. Check out this book for instance –
http://books.google.com/books?id=FJa72GHwQTIC&dq=The+Codex+Calendar+of+354&printsec=frontcover&source=in&hl=en&ei=VZQWS4HIMsuBnQf5_fXjBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=11&ved=0CDEQ6AEwCg#v=onepage&q=&f=false

I thought that Fr. Dudley did a good job of pointing out just how comfortable many are with the very unbiblical elements that have been incorporated into Christmas. We are creatures of habit with a tendency to do things the way we always have done them with little or no examination.

Sunday the prelude was “Wachet Auf” by Bach. “Wake, Awake, for Night is Flying…” That, and the blue candles and vestments (blue to symbolize Hope) send shivers of hope to my heart and tears to my eyes. Maybe the new year will be different, I can’t say how. “Your kingdom come; your will be done on earth as in heaven.”