Christmas Every Day

1131

It was a tough year in England. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:  This year, after Christmas, on a Monday night, at the first sleep, was the heaven on the northern hemisphere all as if it were burning fire; so that all who saw it were so dismayed as they never were before. That was on the third day before the ides of January. This same year was so great a murrain [infectious disease] of cattle as never was before in the memory of man over all England. That was in neat cattle [horned oxen] and in swine; so that in a town where there were ten ploughs going, or twelve, there was not left one: and the man that had two hundred or three hundred swine, had not one left. Afterwards perished the hen fowls; then shortened the fleshmeat, and the cheese, and the butter. May God better it when it shall be his will.

The first lottery in England took place on the 11^th of January, 1569, at the west door of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The scheme, which had been announced two years before, shows that the lottery consisted of forty thousand lots or shares, at ten shillings each, and that it comprehended ‘a great number of good prizes, as well of ready money as of plate, and certain sorts of merchandize.’ The object of any profit that might arise from the scheme was the reparation of harbours and other useful public works.

Today, the lottery is a tried and trusted way of government revenue collection with prizes in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2016 a prize of $1.58 billion was shared among three winners of the Powerball lottery. The biggest single winner’s ticket yielded $1,537 billion.

It is interesting to consider this 19th-century view of the habit: Lotteries, by creating illusive hopes, and supplanting steady industry, wrought immense mischief. Shopmen robbed their masters, servant girls their mistresses, friends borrowed from each other under false pretences, and husbands stinted their wives and children of necessaries—all to raise the means for buying a portion or the whole of a lottery ticket. But, although the humble and ignorant were the chief purchasers, there were many others who ought to have known better. In the interval between the purchase of a ticket and the drawing of the lottery, the speculators were in a state of unhealthy excitement. On one occasion a fraudulent dealer managed to sell the same ticket to two persons; it came up a five hundred pound prize; and one of the two went raving mad when he found that the real ticket was, after all, not held by him. 

2015, the Charlie Hebdo Massacre

Charlie Hebdo is a weekly French satire magazine, known for its uncompromising (not to say crude) attacks on right-wingers, religions of all sorts, and politicians. In 2006 the magazine printed cartoons which mocked Islam and its founder, Muhammed. This provoked lawsuits but Charlie was undeterred, continuing to satirize Islam. A 2011 issue listed Muhammed as one of the editors and claimed that he was opposed to religious violence. Their offices were firebombed shortly thereafter but Muslim-targeted cartoons continued.

On January 7, 2015, two brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, French-born of Algerian descent entered the Charlie Hebdo offices and killed 12 people and wounded others, some of them journalists but also police officers, a janitor, and passers-by. They claimed to be operating under the sanction of al-Qaeda and shouted “Allahu Akbar! Allah is greatest!” as they escaped. Two days later the gunmen were cornered and killed as they tried to shoot their way past police. During this standoff, one of their supporters in Paris took hostages in a kosher grocery story and killed four shoppers.

January 6 is Epiphany on the Christian calendar, one of those days when coronations often took place in the Middle Ages. Consider the following:

1017 Cnut (or Canute) is crowned King of England

Cnut (995-1935) is known as Cnut the Great, having formed a North Atlantic empire composed of England, Denmark, and Norway. He was an effective king of England  but his composite kingdom fell apart on his death, leading to a restoration of the Anglo-Saxon dynasty.

1066 Harold II is crowned King of England

Harold (1022-1066) was the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings of England. He succeeded his brother-in-law, the childless Edward the Confessor, but faced two rivals for the throne. The first was an invasion of the Viking Harald Hardrada who was aided by Harold II’s treacherous brother Tostig. Before the decisive battle of Stamford bridge Harold tried unsuccessfully to woo back his brother, but ended up killing him and Hardrada in battle. Harold was less successful against the invasion by William of Normandy, falling to an arrow in the eye at the Battle of Hastings.

1322 Stefan Uroš III is crowned King of Serbia

Balkan politics have always been a blood sport. As a youth Stefan (1285-1331) was sent by his father to be a hostage in the hands of the Mongol Golden Horde. Having survived that he quarrelled with his father who sent him to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, with secret instructions that the Byzantines blind him, rendering him unfit to succeed his father. The blinding was not total and when, on the death of his father, Stefan faced rivals for the throne he was able to win support by claiming that a divine miracle had restored his sight.

1449 Constantine XI is crowned Byzantine Emperor

Constantine (1405-1453) was the last Christian ruler of Constantinople, the last Roman emperor. This Byzantine empire had fallen on hard times and had shrunk to a few holdings in Greece and along the Black Sea coast and the capital itself. In 1453 the Turks under Mehmet the Conqueror stormed the city and Constantine died in the fighting. His body was never recovered and legend says he will return one day and drive out the Turks.

1999, Death of a cultural appropriator

In a 1971 public service announcement so iconic that it made The Simpsons, Iron Eyes Cody, seemingly a nature-loving native American, is depicted crying at the litter that pollutes the landscape. On this day in 1999 that actor died.

Iron Eyes Cody appeared in over 200 films and 100 television episodes making a comfortable living portraying the Indian part of “Cowboys and Indians”: Chief Black Feather, Chief Sky Eagle, Chief Watashi, Chief St Cloud, Chief Thundercloud, Chief Big Cloud, Chief Grey Cloud, Chief Yellow Cloud, Crazy Horse, Crazy Foot, Crow Foot, etc.

To the end of his days, Mr Cody insisted that he was a Cherokee, or a Cree, or some other sort of tribesman. In fact, he was the son of Italian immigrants, born Espera Oscar de Corti. He began his Hollywood career as an extra and ended it having his own star on the Walk of Fame.

1791 The Big Bottom Massacre

If you were to observe a historical marker in Morgan County, Ohio, you might read the following:

James Patten, along with four other men, was taken prisoner in the raid and spent four years in captivity until being released in a trade. In August 1794, General Anthony Wayne ordered construction of Fort Defiance and on Jan. 29, 1795 an Indian peace envoy went to the fort. The envoy included Patten and other captives. Patten, who was born in 1753 in Bedford, New Hampshire, was released as part of an exchange for Indian prisoners.

1902 First Rose Bowl Football Game

In the very first Tournament of Roses football game, undefeated Michigan (10-0) met a Stanford team with a record of 3-1-2. The result was a massacre. Going into the match, Michigan had scored 501 points; their opponents had scored none. Stanford would fare no better, losing 49-0 and requesting that the game be mercifully ended with over 8 minutes left on the clock. The game was so lopsided that for the next 13 years, the Tournament of Roses officials ran chariot races, ostrich races, and other various events instead of football.

Rules of the time included the following quirks:

• The playing field was 110 yards long
• Touchdowns counted five points, field goals five, and conversions one
• The game was divided into two thirty-minute halves
• A team had to make five yards in three downs to make a first down
• Forward passes were not allowed
• Substitutions were used infrequently as 11 men usually played the entire game

1879, The Tay Bridge Disaster

On the evening of December 28, 1879 an unexpectedly strong wind struck the bridge over the Firth of Tay in Scotland at the same moment that a passenger train heading north to Dundee was on the structure. The bridge collapsed, sending the train hurtling into the water, killed all of its passengers and crew. Only 46 bodies were recovered but it was feared as there may have been as many as 70 to 75 dead. Subsequent investigations revealed a number of design flaws, particularly regarding wind loading, poor maintenance, and excessive train speed.

Today the disaster is known best for the commemorative piece written in 1880 by William McGonnagal, possibly the world’s worst poet. A section of this masterpiece is included.

Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last sabbath day of 1879

Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

Oh! Ill-fated bridge of the silv’ry Tay,

I now must conclude my lay

By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,

That your central girders would not have given way,

At least many sensible men do say,

Had they been supported on each side with buttresses

At least many sensible men confesses,

For the stronger we our houses do build,

The less chance we have of being killed.

The passing of four notorious characters

1948 Hideki Tojo

Tojo was the unacceptable face of Japanese militarism. A veteran of the campaigns in China, Tojo urged war on the USA when America imposed an embargo on Japan because of its expansion on the Asian mainland. He was Army Minister during the decision to attack Pearl Harbor and eventually rose to the position of Prime Minister and Chief of the General Staff. After Japan’s defeat Tojo was arrested for war crimes but failed in a suicide attempt. He was found guilty and executed on this day in 1948.

1953 Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria

Beria (1899-1953) was a brilliant and much-feared apparatchik in the Stalin regime. At the age of 20 Beria, born a Georgian, joined the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, and participated in the crushing of Georgian independence. He rose through the Party ranks and by 1934 was one of Stalin’s most trusted advisors. As deputy head of the NKVD he helped carry out the purges of the late 1930s and was rewarded with the top NKVD post and a place on the Politburo. He was responsible for the Katyn massacre of the Polish officer class, and aided the success of the anti-Nazi partisan effort, and the development of the Soviet atomic bomb program. When Stalin died, Beria tried to gain popularity by carrying out liberalization but was arrested by his fellows at the top of the Communist Party and shot. He is a central character in the very black comedy The Death of Stalin.

1961 Kurt Meyer

Kurt Meyer (1910-1961) was 20 when he joined the SS, the Nazi elite paramilitary. Attached to its Waffen SS units he served in many major campaigns, steadily winning a series of victories and decorations. An enthusiastic Nazi, he seems to have committed war crimes in the invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union, killing Jews and other innocent civilians. In 1944 his regiment was stationed in Normandy during the Allied landings where they massacred Canadian prisoners of war. Meyer was taken prisoner and after the war tried for the murder of those prisoners. He was found guilty and served time in Dorchester prisoner in New Brunswick. On his release he helped perpetrate the myth that the Waffen SS were not murderous fanatics but plain old soldiers with scarcely a blot on their character.

2012 Jean Harris

Jean Harris (1923-2012) was the headmistress of an exclusive private school while she was carrying on an affair with celebrity diet doctor Herman Tarnower. Though she knew that he had often had relations with other women, Harris grew particularly jealous of Tarnower’s latest flame, his much-younger receptionist. On March 10, 1980 she drove to his home and shot him dead. At her trial she claimed that she had intended to commit suicide but in a struggle the gun had accidentally discharged into Tarnower’s body four times. Harris was found guilty of second-degree murder but only served 11 years before being released.

1095 Birth of Roger II of Sicily

The Normans were a scurvy crew. Essentially Vikings with a haircut, they spread from the territory they had extorted from the King of France in 911 all across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. They were banditti, mercenaries, and crusaders, eventually setting up kingdoms in England, Ireland, southern Italy and the Levant. The most glorious of these was the Kingdom of Sicily, wrested from the Muslims who had invaded the island in the 9th century. For a couple of glorious centuries the Normans ran a nation blending the best of Catholic, Byzantine, Jewish, Lombard and Muslim art, law, architecture and statecraft. Its capital at Palermo was the largest city in Europe and visitors today still marvel at churches such as the Cappella Palatina featured above.

The Capella was commissioned by the first king of Sicily, Roger II, whose birthday is today. His state was multi-relgious and tolerant and to his court came scholars, scientists and artists from around the Mediterranean. His armies and fleets warred against the Byzantine empire and against Arab powers, from whom he successfully conquered a section of the North African coastline. He died in 1154.