Christmas Every Day

2007 An ornament of popular culture

Future historians may well note this date as the beginning of the end of Western Civilization. Keeping Up With the Kardashians, a “reality” television show of a particularly inane and sordid nature, aired for the first time on the E! Cable network.

At the end of the 20th century the name Kardashian meant very little in the public mind, except for those who remembered that one Robert Kardashian had been among the legal team that secured O.J. Simpson his acquittal for murder. It seems, however, that in 1978 Mr. Kardashian had married flight attendant Kris Houghton and spawned a number of daughters whose names began with the letter “K” — Kourtney (b. 1979), Kim (b. 1980), and Khloé (b. 1984) — and a son, Rob (b. 1987), for whom, apparently, no suitable “K” name could be found. The parents divorced in 1991 and a month later Kim married Olympic decathlete hero, Bruce Jenner. From his loins sprang two more “K” kids, Kendall (b. 1995) and Kylie (b. 1997) before he, through the miracle of surgery, transitioned to Caitlin Jenner, for some reason declining an opportunity to become “Kaitlyn”.

This blended family lived lives of little distinction: Kris opened a kids’ store; Kim was a stylist and personal shopper; she and her sisters ran a clothing store. Fortunately, Kim, in a moment of girlish innocence, had made a sex tape in 2007 with someone named Ray J and this tape (oops) was released to the public. Kim was now famous, or — even better — notorious. And she was rich, having made $5,000,000 from the tape’s distributor. All this whetted the public appetite for all things Kardashian and some genius decided that a television crew recording the family’s every move and utterance would prove to be gripping broadcast fare. And so it proved. Despite the sound of critics slashing their own wrists, Keeping Up With the Kardashians has become a staple of American popular culture making millionaires of its subjects. Of their failed marriages, breast enhancements, sex-changes, overdoses, spats, divorces, 325-page book of selfies, and all-encompassing family values, we shall say no more.

The big four sports organizations in North America are Major League Baseball, The National Football League, the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association. Rival leagues have come — the WFL, the XFL, the WHA, the ABL, etc. — and gone, but only one plucky challenger has had any real effect on their sport: the American Basketball Association which played its first game on this date in 1967, a contest between the Anaheim Amigos and the Oakland Oaks. (Oakland won 134-129).

As is usual with these upstart leagues, ownership was often shaky and fan support was sparse. Despite the presence of star players like Rick Barry, Julius Irving, and George “the Iceman” Gervin, changes of team names and locations were frequent. The Anaheim Amigos became the Los Angeles Stars and then the Utah Stars; the Oakland Oaks morphed into the Washington Capitals and then the Virginia Squires. The most extreme case of instability was the case of the New Orleans Buccaneers/Louisiana Buccaneers/Memphis Pros/Memphis Tams/Memphis Sounds/Baltimore Hustlers/Baltimore Claws.

The plan of franchise owners was to force a merger with the NBA which was feeling the influence of the higher salaries that the arrival of the ABA had produced. Only a few teams endured to reap the benefits of this plan. In 1976 the ABA folded with four teams — the Indiana Pacers, New York Nets, San Antonio Spurs, and Denver Nuggets — joining their older competitor. Though the league had died, a few of their innovations were attractive enough to be adopted by the NBA: the 3-point arc, the slam-dunk contest, and market penetration into states that had hitherto been college basketball hothouses.

1571 Battle of Lepanto

Since the 1370s the Ottoman Turks had been making themselves the dominant power in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, rolling back Christian and other Muslim opponents. In 1453 they took the last remnant of the Roman Empire when they smashed in the walls of Constantinople; in 1517 they seized Egypt and Arabia and claimed the Sunni Caliphate; in 1522 they drove the Knights of St John out of their fortress in Rhodes; 1527 they reached the gates of Vienna. Turkish fleets, including those of their North African pirate underlings, threatened every mile of the Christian Mediterranean coastline. From his Topkapi Palace their Emperor ruled territory from the Atlantic to the Euphrates.

Turkish success owed much to Christian disunity. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire to Constantinople, surveyed the situation in the 1550s and declared:

 On their side is the vast wealth of their empire, unimpaired resources, experience and practice in arms, a veteran soldiery, an uninterrupted series of victories, readiness to endure hardships, union, order, discipline, thrift and watchfulness. On ours are found an empty exchequer, luxurious habits, exhausted resources, broken spirits, a raw and insubordinate soldiery, and greedy quarrels; there is no regard for discipline, license runs riot, the men indulge in drunkenness and debauchery, and worst of all, the enemy are accustomed to victory, we to defeat. Can we doubt what the result must be?

Though previous attempts at a Christian alliance against the Turks had failed, Pope Pius V laboured to put together a coalition to save Cyprus in 1571. The resulting “Holy League” included ships from Spain, Venice, Genoa, the Knights of St John, the Papal States and Florence. Keeping order in this fragile alliance was the job of Don John of Austria, the bastard brother of the Spanish King, who had to hang a few troublesome captains to assert the necessary unity.

The combined Christian fleet numbered 212 ships, almost all oar-propelled galleys, 40,000 sailors and 28,000 infantry. They faced a Turkish force of 251 ships, 50,000 oarsmen and 31,000 soldiers in the Gulf of Patras off the coast of southwestern Greece. The key to the battle was the deployment, in front of the Holy League’s ships, of four galleasses, large, clumsy, heavily-armed vessels bristling with cannons which blew up 70 Muslim galleys before they could reach the Christian line. The Turkish galleys carried crack Janissary troops, the elite fighting force of the Ottomans, but they were outgunned by their opponents. The day ended in a near-complete Christian victory; they sunk or captured over 150 enemy ships, killing or capturing 20,000 men and liberating 12,000 Christian slaves from the Turkish galleys.

The Turks would soon rebuild their fleet and continue to dominate the eastern Mediterranean but their defeat at Lepanto cost them dearly in experienced sailors and fighters. The Holy League would soon dissolve but Christian fleets would never face a serious naval threat again in the central or western Mediterranean. The boost to morale was incalculable and Lepanto still figures prominently in the civic mythology of Venice and Spain.

Our Lady of the Rosary

Pope Pius V atributed the triumph to the intercession of the Virgin Mary and created a new festival for Our Lady of Victory. Two years later Pope Gregory XIII changed the name to the “Feast of the Holy Rosary” and in 1960 Pope Paul VI renamed it again to the “Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary”

There are numerous churches dedicated to either Our Lady of Victory or Our Lady of the Rosary Maria del Rosario is a common Spanish girl’s name while Rosario is a popular name for boys in the Catholic world.

1793 The French Revolution dechristianizes the calendar

Since its beginning in 1789, forces of the French Revolution had been hostile to Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church. The monastic system had been abolished and all church lands seized by the government. The Catholic church was severed from its allegiance to the Pope and its clergy became civil servants, forced to swear loyalty to the state; priests who refused were subject to imprisonment, exile, or death. All church bells were seized and melted down to make artillery; church silver and precious objects were stolen; crosses were torn down, tombs were desecrated, and buildings turned over to secular uses. In place of Christianity, supporters of the Revolution offered the near-atheist Cult of Reason or the deist Cult of the Supreme Being.

On October 5, 1703 the traditional calendar with its Anno Domini dating from the birth of Christ, its seven-day week and names drawn from mythology was abolished and replaced by a revolutionary calendar. All months now had 30 days, divided into 3 ten-day décades, with a 5-day year-end holiday. Saints’ days were abolished and instead of a day of rest every 7 days, there was now one every 10 days — revolutionaries despised the idleness encouraged by the old church calendar and its many holidays. Dating was to take place from the beginning of the French Republic, months were named after climatic conditions and days were named after tools or common objects. Thus, Christmas Day 1793 was officially V nivôse II, le jour de chien — Year II, the fifth day of the snowy month, the day of the dog. (It could have been worse, December 28 was “the day of manure.”) There was even a short-lived attempt to decimalize the clock: a ten-hour day, each hour with 100 minutes. 

Such efforts were made to remove every-day religion from the minds of the common people but ordinary folk did not fail to notice that they now had to work more days in the year. Though governments tried to enforce the reforms, they never truly caught on and Napoleon ended the experiment on XIII frimaire XIII, January 1, 1806.

1187 Saladin Captures Jerusalem

The Catholic knights of the First Crusade had taken much of the eastern coastline of the Mediterranean away from Muslim forces by 1100 and set up a number of Christian enclaves, principally the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The westerners had benefited from Islamic political divisions in the area but as the 12^th century wore on, those divisions were healed and an Arab counter-attack had begun. In 1144 Edessaa fell to the Turks, prompting an unsuccessful Second Crusade that failed to return the city to Christian control.

In the person of An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, known in the West as Saladin, Muslim forces in the Middle East found a powerful leader. In 1169 he conquered Egypt from the Fatimid dynasty and in 1174 he made himself master of Syria. Despite attempts to kill him by the Assassins (a Shi’ite sect) he managed to unite most of the Arab forces in a bid to oust the Crusaders from the Middle East.

On July 4, 1187 Saladin defeated a large Crusader army at the Battle of Hattin (depicted in the dreadful Hollywood film Kingdom of Heaven which you must never, ever watch if you value historical truth) taking the King of Jerusalem, Guy de Lusignan, prisoner, and massacring Templar and Hospitaller prisoners. He then moved against the city of Jerusalem and placed it under siege. Defenders under Balian of Ibelin swore to destroy sacred Islamic sites inside the city if reasonable surrender terms were not granted, so Saladin agreed to let Christians withdraw from the city on payment of a low ransom. On October 2, 1187 the city surrendered, with Saladin keeping about 15,000 Christian residents as slaves.

The fall of Jerusalem prompted the Third Crusade, led by Richard Lionheart of England who was able to defeat Saladin in battle but could not recapture the city. Saladin achieved a glowing reputation among Christians during the Middle Ages as a noble infidel. Dante placed him in Limbo along with other virtuous non-Christians such as Socrates and Plato.

Alexander Roberts Dunn VC (15 September 1833 – 25 January 1868) was born in York (later Toronto) in 1833, the son of John Henry Dunn, a prominent politician. He studied at Upper Canada College and at Harrow School, England. He purchased a commission in the 11th Hussars in 1852. This would have been an expensive move because that regiment was one of the most prestigious and elegant units in the British Army, famous for its cherry-coloured trousers.

Dunn was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions at the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 when he was 21 years of age. Dunn rescued a sergeant by cutting down two or three Russian lancers who had attacked from the rear. Later in the battle he killed another Russian who had been attacking a private.

He sold his commission at the end of the Crimean War but rejoined the Army in 1858 as a major in the 100th Regiment of Foot. He exchanged into the 33rd Regiment of Foot, in 1864 in which regiment he remained until his death.

Dunn was promoted to the rank of colonel in 1864, making him the first Canadian to command a British regiment. He led the 33rd Regiment at the start of the 1868 expedition to Abyssinia (meant to rescue British hostages and teach the mad King Tewodros of Ethiopia a lesson), but he was killed in unusual circumstances during a hunting accident at Senafe before the military part of the campaign started.

His grave (in present-day Eritrea) had been neglected for many years. It was discovered after over a century by Canadian Army Forces for the United Nations Mission to Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE) during their mission as peacekeepers in the Eritrea-Ethiopia war of 1998-2000. The discovery as narrated by Ben Mitchell of the Canadian Armed Forces is:

We had just advanced from our rear camp in Dekemhare into Senafe. We had crossed both trench lines in Senafe and their mine fields. Tensions were very high for not only the Eritrea and Ethiopian armies but for us as well. There was still military forces in the area, whom were not supposed to be there. We knew our task of getting the militaries to withdraw would be tuff. We set up camp in the school yard at the base of that amazing cliff. My Lieutenant and I left the camp right away to search for a well in the city and this is when it first happened. The children in the city gathered around us and said “Canada” while pulling our hands to lead us somewhere. Now there was no way we were going anywhere with these kids. This thing smelled of an ambush badly. How did they know the word “Canada” and why were they so eager to lead us away? The two of us then returned to the schoolyard and reported this unusual event to Headquarters (HQ). 2 weeks went by and each patrol that entered the city had the same experience with the kids. Each time they would report it to HQ and say they did not follow the children. Finally HQ got tired of hearing about these children and orders us to investigate. Now this is when it gets embarrassing for us. We geared up to follow these kids like we were entering an ambush…we were ready for anything that may happen. We had over 300 rounds of ammunition per soldier, flak jackets, radios, machine guns. We were not going to be caught off guard. When we entered the city, the same routine happened with the kids, but this time we let them lead us. Weapons on our shoulders we walked through the city slowly waiting for something to happen. I remember how hot it was that day and how much I was sweating. Finally we got to a cemetery on the outskirts of the city and the kids started pointing at this tombstone. We looked at the name “COL DUNN”. When we got back to camp we radioed in what had happened. HQ sent a report back to Canada asking them to figure out who this DUNN was. A week later we found out. The kids had led us to the grave of a Canadian war hero R. Dunn, one of the first winners of the Victoria Cross. The highest order of merit issues in the Canadian Forces. This man was a legend. He had gone on safari Africa in 1860’s and never returned. He was a Canadian hero who had been lost for over a hundred years. These kids whom we thought were leading us into an ambush had done Canada a great service and located Colonel R. Dunn Victoria Cross. If those kids were not as persistent as they were we would never have followed them and we would have never found Colonel Dunn.

His grave after the discovery was repaired in 2001 by a group of Canadian Forces engineers from CFB Gagetown.

If you go into the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise. So says the children’s song, “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic”. So said German chieftain Arminius to the Roman legions of General Varus in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.

Arminius, or Hermann to the folks back home, was a young chief of the Cherusci tribe who spent his youth in Rome as a hostage and later as a soldier, being granted Roman citizenship and command of military units.

In 7 AD he returned to Germania where the Romans had penetrated beyond the Rhine, occupying large tracts of territory and reducing tribes to a tributary status. Arminius began to conspire with other chieftains to form a pan-tribal alliance and drive the Germans out. In the early autumn of 9 AD he convinced Varus, the governor of Germania, that a distant Roman garrison was endangered and that he should send troops to rescue them. Varus promptly marched three legions, the Seventeenth, the Eighteenth, and the Twentieth, out of his safe fortifications into an ambush in which the Roman army was hacked to bits and massacred.

Augustus Caesar was distraught, said to cry out for months afterward, “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”He sent retaliatory raids back across the Rhine which laid waste to German villages and recovered two of the three lost legionary eagles. Roman troops happened upon the site of Arminius’ victory and according to the historian Tacitus this is what they saw:

In the center of the field were the whitening bones of men, as they had fled, or stood their ground, strewn everywhere or piled in heaps. Near lay fragments of weapons and limbs of horses, and also human heads, prominently nailed to trunks of trees. In the adjacent groves were the barbarous altars, on which they had immolated tribunes and first-rank centurions.

Some survivors of the disaster who had escaped from the battle or from captivity, described how this was the spot where the officers fell, how yonder the eagles were captured, where Varus was pierced by his first wound, where too by the stroke of his own ill-starred hand he found for himself death. They pointed out too the raised ground from which Arminius had harangued his army, the number of gibbets for the captives, the pits for the living, and how in his exultation he insulted the standards and eagles. 

This was a decisive victory for the tribes because it convinced the Romans that there was little to be gained in renewing their conquest; henceforth they built their border defences along the Rhine. 

The alliance that Arminius had put together soon collapsed and he was murdered in 21 AD by his own tribesmen who feared he was growing too powerful.

1900

Birthday of an Assassin

On February 15, 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt was giving a speech from an open car in Miami, Florida. From the back of the crowd of onlookers, a short man stood on a chair and began firing pistol shots. Before he was subdued, he had wounded five people, including Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak who later died from his injury.

The killer was brick-layer Giuseppe Zangara born on this date in 1900 in Calabria, Italy. It was assumed at first that his target had been the President, a motive that seemed to be corroborated when he stated in the police station: “I have the gun in my hand. I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists.” Despite a history of mental illness Zangara was quickly found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in the electric chair, a fate which he scorned, telling the judge: ““You give me electric chair. I no afraid of that chair! You one of capitalists. You is crook man too. Put me in electric chair. I no care!” He was executed on March 20.

Since his death suspicions have been expressed that FDR was not the intended victim and that Cermak had been the real target. This was at the time when Chicago housed gangsters such as Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik and Frank Nitti, Al Capone’s successor as head of the city’s organized crime syndicate. Cermak was rumoured to have ordered a hit on Nitti in which the mobster was shot three times, and Zangara was supposedly a hitman hired to take revenge.

September 6, 1522

The first circumnavigation of the globe completed

In August, 1519 a fleet of five ships under the command of Ferdinand Magellan set sail from the port of Seville for a voyage around the world. Of the 250 crewmen aboard those ships, only 18 survived to return home on September 6, 1522 from their journey of 14,460 Spanish leagues (60,440 km or 37,560 mi). The expedition was chartered by the King of Spain but the crew was drawn from Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Greece, England and France. Its purpose was to reach the Indies without travelling around the horn of Africa, a route controlled by the Portuguese.

The fleet crossed the Atlantic without incident but when resupplying in what is now Argentina, a mutiny broke out, forcing Magellan to execute the captains of two of his ships and a number of rebellious crewmen; other mutineers he marooned. After a winter spent on shore, Magellan laboriously navigated through the narrow channels at the tip of South America to reach the Pacific. In doing so, one ship was wrecked and another abandoned the voyage to return to Spain. The three remaining vessels headed northwest and in March 1521 they became the first Europeans to reach the Philippine archipelago. Magellan involved himself in local politics as well as trading with the natives; he converted some regional nobles to Christianity but others he chose to war with. On April 27, Magellan and dozens of his men were killed in battle, leaving the fleet seriously undermanned. The crew consolidated on to two ships and continued their journey through the Spice Islands but when Trinidad, the larger vessel, showed signs of damage the expedition split up. The smaller Victoria would continue west toward Africa while the crew of Trinidad would repair their ship and return via the route by which they had come. Trinidad was captured by the Portuguese and lost but Victoria would eventually limp home under his captain Juan Sebastián Elcano with a starving, skeleton crew and a hold full of spices. The three years of adventure had cost the lives of 232 sailors but laid the foundation of Spain’s empire in the East.

476

The Fall of the Roman Empire in the West

Though Rome was sacked in 410 by a Visigothic horde and again in 451 by a Vandal fleet, the empire in the West itself continued to exist, though in a much weakened condition. An emperor ruled, at least on paper, from Ravenna on the northeast Italian coast. Real power was in the hands of the generals, many of them of Germanic descent, in charge of the few Roman armies left in the field and of the barbarian chieftains whose tribes had overrun most of the West. Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Picts, Scots, Alemanni, Burgundians, etc., had all carved off pieces of the empire.

In 475 a teenager by the name of Romulus Augustulus had been set up as Western Emperor by one of his generals but he exercised no real power. The next year an army of Ostrogoths led by Odoacer finished its conquest of the Italian peninsula by taking Ravenna. Romulus was forced to hand over the imperial regalia — crown, orb and scepter — to his barbarian conqueror but his life was spared. The position of emperor had fallen so low that the incumbent was not even worth killing; the boy was simply sent on his way with a pension to console him. Odoacer never bothered to claim the throne either, pretending to rule Italy on behalf of Zeno, the emperor in Constantinople to whom he sent the regalia. Zeno then declared the division of the empire at an end; henceforth until 1453 the Roman Empire was ruled from Constantinople.

Italians could not have been too unhappy or dismayed by those events. Peace was restored and taxes continued to be collected. One vexatious point was that the Ostrogoths were Arian (non-trinitarian Christians) with their own hierarchy of bishops ruling over a largely Trinitarian (Catholic, Chalcedonian, Nicene; take your pick) population. Toleration was usually the order of the day — for the Gothic rulers Arianism was a tribal badge — but Catholic bishops often had to struggle to keep their church buildings. The Ostrogoths built a number of beautiful churches in Ravenna, especially the Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo, with its gorgeous mosaics. (Arians in North Africa were much less accommodating and genuine persecution took place there.)