Merry Giftmas Everyone!

On this very day in the year 272 was the first official public celebration of Dies Natalis Invicti Solis, a pagan Roman holiday that was later co-opted by Christians to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Turning the holiday into "Christmas" (in 336 AD) was part of a pattern of the church "borrowing" various pagan festivals and feast days.

Since we're on the topic here's a quiz on Christmas Specials, covering everything from the classic standards to the you never saw them or shouldn't have ever seen them obscure ones. I cranked out a score of 24/36 myself.

And since we're coming up on the end of the year, everyone is breaking out their year in review stuff and here's Time's Year in Pictures for 2006. There are some really awesome photos in there, but what else would you expect from TIME? I wonder if National Geographic has something similar? I should check into that, their photography is always amazing. Here's another collection of 99 amazing photos from the past year, but I don't think they match up to the ones from Time, and not all are amazing, but it would be hard to sell papers if they called them "99 not bad photos from 2006".

I hate to end this post on a downer, but early this morning the Godfather of Soul, Mr. Please Please Please, James Brown, died at the age of 73.

Also the past month and half have been rough on the world of cartoons. On November 20 Chris Hayward writer of the flat out hilarious Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons died and on December 18 Joe Barbera, one half of the Hanna-Barbera team, died.