Will there be an October Newsletter?
JulianDracos
Mapmaker
October is almost over and I haven't received a monthly newsletter. It looks like there was not one in 2020. There was one in 2019. So just wondering if this month is being skipped until Xmas sales in November.
Comments
And is there a free monthly issue? Perhaps Ralf's holiday means he is given the month off these things, which is richly deserved.
Yes and yes. Working on it right now. :)
BTW @Ralf , the blurb in the download page still says September:
It does contain October's offering though - love the fortified harbour
I had no idea there was free monthly content. It took me awhile to find what you all were look at. I hadn't received a newletter so I was checking my spam folder thinking I had missed something. That we were being sent something for free in October instead of a discount code. Turns out there is just free monthly content. I guess I have missed a lot of free content . . .
Look on the bright side - now you have it downloaded, you haven't missed any of it, as the whole set of freebies for 2021 so far is included in that one file!
That is true. I was just assuming there was free content in 2020 that I missed.
This is a new thing that started 5 months ago.
Heh. Now it says Octobre instead of October. 🙃
Well, what's wrong with French?
Isn't that Spanish for October ?
Octobre is French, Octubre is Spanish, Octubris is Latin, and u-Okthoba is Zulu.
2 months to Christmas is what it really is.
@Quenten - You forgot Italian. It's Ottobre. And don't forget the German. Oktober. Here's one you may not have heard: the Hebrew equivalent is Tishri or Heshvan. They actually use a mix of solar and lunar calendars, so their months don't always match up exactly with ours.
I'm sure there are plenty more where those came from.
And people complain about English being confusing - the tenth month is named the eighth? Really???
😁🎰
It is not English's fault. Church authorities kept moving the calendar around and changed when the new year started.
Someone once told me that was to match the Christian festive seasons with traditional pagan celebrations, to literally distract pagans with bigger, flashier parties held at the same time as the pagan ones - or or something like that.
But we still have Christmas trees, and Easter eggs :)
I wasn't really suggesting it was the fault of the English; just commenting on how many different nationalities had decided to call the tenth month "the eighth" 😉
In fact, it goes back way before the Christian Church, to the ancient Romans in the first millennium BCE, and survived as a month name even after the Julian calendar reforms of 46 BCE shifted it to being the tenth, not the eighth, month (by the Julius that was Caesar - hence also "July"), and on to today.
Well...
So far as I recall, the earliest record of the Christmas tree is from the 1520s CE Rhineland, which was of course firmly Christian at the time. There were earlier records of different, much smaller, forms of green vegetation, up to small branch size, being taken to, or into, homes around the Christmas/northern winter solstice period in various parts of Europe long before this, including back into the first millennium BCE. However, this seems to have been a common theme for pagan celebrations at many other times of year as well. Setting Christmas as Dec 25 is definitely recorded only from 354 CE at Rome though. The date was chosen (in preference to others at the time and before, which were usually sometime in the northern spring) apparently because there was indeed a pagan solstice festival for the Roman Sun God on the same date, albeit that was decreed only in 274 CE, and seemingly wasn't a particularly major event. The pagans overall were rather more "distracted" by whatever was the current Roman Emperor's preferred choice of deity. (Pretty much what happened in Britain too during Tudor and Stuart times, but with Protestant or Catholic Church beliefs holding sway, for instance.)
Eggs were one of the foods prohibited by the medieval Christian Church during Lent, in the six weeks before Easter, and while eggs were long a popular symbol of new life and spring-time in general, their attachment to Easter (in various subsequent forms) seems to have come about simply through the Christian Lenten prohibition, rather than because of any pre-existing pagan significance associated with the Easter festival time (mobile anyway, as Easter was and is tied to the timing of the first full Moon after the northern vernal equinox). Eggs were a regular delicacy for those unable to afford meat (i.e. most of the population in Europe) in medieval times, for instance.
[All a bit fresh in mind, as I was looking into European calendar customs in some detail recently, part of something for my latest Community Atlas mapping.]
Just as well this thread was answered a while back, as I've thoroughly hijacked it now - sorry!
@Wyvern You seem to have a habit these days of hijacking threads, but so be it. You are absolutely correct in looking back to Julius Caesar for the origins of our calendar mess. Hence, as you say, the "Julian" calendar. He wanted to be immortalized so he placed his own month smack-dab in the middle of the year, pushing the other months down. Some time later, Caesar Augustus, not wanting to be outdone, added his own month ("August") just after Julius ("July"), once again sliding the months down. Hence we have September (the 7th month) now as the ninth; October (the 8th) became the tenth; November (the 9th month) became the eleventh and December (the 10th month) was destined to be celebrated as the twelfth month. The last two original month names fell off and have been forgotten.
As to the western traditions involving our common religious holidays, they were in use long before the middle ages. These all date back to the pagan mystery religions of Babylon some twenty-five hundred to thirty-five hundred years ago. The combination of eggs and bunnies were symbols of fertility for the so-called Queen of Heaven, Semiramis. The name Easter itself is derived from the Babylonian goddess "Ishtar," and was a form of Semiramis/Astarte/Isis worship. We can thank the Roman emperor Constantine (circa 320 AD, or CE if you prefer) for beginning the process of incorporating the practices of earth-based pagan religions with a form of quasi-Christianity to make the new state religion of Christianity more appealing to the masses of his empire. The practices didn't change really, just the names. Unfortunately most of this pagan symbolism persists today.
I like the French revolutionary calendar for names.
So as this was a late newsletter it would be the Brumaire Newsletter; other ones in the old fashioned, positively evil October are Vendemaiaire Newsletters.