Poul Anderson has space travelers celebrating Christmas light years from Earth and SM Stirling has time travelers celebrating it millennia in the past. Festivals mean what we make them mean.Stirling's Nantucketers consume:
turkey
mashed potatoes
peas
squash
carrots
pumpkin pie sweetened with honey
no cream (milk too expensive)
dried-cranberry muffins
cookies
drinks
After the dinner, a marriage is announced. A woman who was married in the twentieth century needs no divorce to remarry in 1250 B.C. Her first husband is not dead. He has not been born yet.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
The theological implications of Christians (Catholic and Protestant) cast back more than 3000 years into the past are baffling to make sense of!
First, let's assume the more hopeful of two possibilities is true: such time castaways did not wipe out OUR future, they started a separate divergent timeline.
Second, can Christians cast back to eras BEFORE Christ was Incarnated and born celebrate his Birth? I've wondered if Christians thrown into the past like that might become analogous to the Jews: the people among whom the Messiah would eventually be born. It certainly would make for a very strangely different New Testament in the Nantucket time line!
Sean
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