Everyone except a handful of enlightened beings hold firmly to one or more dogmas until they can reach higher perspectives. I have held to one in particular ever since I could read, round about the age of five. It is this: “Ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free.” I found by experience that the quotation may have been incomplete. The ending should have been….” But first it will make you miserable.”

Christmas has been in our eyes and ears and pocket books since the day after Thanksgiving. So I thought to go once again into the labyrinth of the invention of Christmas and many of its current ramifications in the next few postings. It is a fascinating example of how a story continually told over many years becomes its own evidence. ‘Everybody knows’ is not evidence. Almost everyone in my favorite coffee house ‘knows’ a tremendous amount about Tiger Woods. None of them have ever met him, nor are they likely to meet him.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the appearance of an extremely famous and much loved appearance of the Goddess as 'The Lady who is always called the Virgin Mary,' unless she appears in India, Tibet, or Greece, the Lady of Guadalupe.

Let’s investigate now what is known about a myth associated with Christmas that many people believed in, and were encouraged in that belief, until they grew up somewhat; I refer to Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle and others. It’s an amazing smorgasbord of interweaving stories and shows how stories can grow and spread out tentacles that become stories in their own right.

At the suggestion of a valued reader I affix here a few of the carols that I wrote for my rune students. They are all sung to tunes familiar to those listening to background music in stores at Christmas.

Tune: We Three Kings

We, Black Wings, his ravens are
Over Midgard we travel far
Hugin, Munin, Thought and
Memory
Odin’s Ravens are
(Chorus)
Ohoooh!
God of Norseman, of insight
With your one Eye shining bright
Aesir leading, war preceding
With your wolves to left and right.

Eight legged Sleipnir travels so far
Nothing can his white coat mar
Son of Loki, mount of Odin

Since I wrote about the way people deceive their children about Santa Claus in Part 2 we have had an article in the local paper giving people advice on how to tell their children about Santa. They are advised to tell their children that Santa is a nice guy so that they aren’t scared when they are plunked on his lap.

Instead of threatening that Santa will ignore them if they don’t do their little chores we are advised to tell them that not cleaning up their room will made Santa sad, and that they may not get any new toys if the old ones are left scattered all over the floor.

An official statement from a Mayan religious body has said that they are sorry but they lost 200 years in their calculations. So the end of the world won’t happen in 2012 as we all hoped. It will take another couple of hundred years. And just as all the omens were looking good. Pollution, global warming, epidemics, genocide, famine, insane wars and all the other stuff.

So what can we do about it. We in this country obviously require some disaster to be afraid of or our lives are not complete. A replacement must be found.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a song almost as likely to be heard this time of year as I’m dreaming of a White Christmas. Like all songs it has a little story and some trivia associated with it. Here is the modern story, and we’ll try and pull in some ancient stuff at the end to connect Rudolph with the far past.

The end of the year is approaching and we tend to look at an overview of the year gone by and see if there’s a possibility of better times in the year ahead.

WW I finally ended in this year of 2009 for Britain. Last year in November, Harry Patch and two other World War I veterans, Henry Allingham and William Stone, aged 108, attended the annual Armistice Day ceremony in London. But Stone died Jan. 10 this year and Allingham aged 113 on July 18. Patch followed exactly one week later aged 111.