Off to Queen’s Road Residents’ Association Christmas Social. This is an A-grade residents’ association which has created not only a truly active body that operates to protect and improve the area – but also a real sense of community.
The two local Liberal Democrat councillors, John Oakes and Ali Demirci, were there. In fact it was John who suggested I might like to drop in.
And how pleasant it is just to go to a social occasion and have a bit of time to talk with people properly. Everyone had brought different foods to contribute – for as ever we are nothing if not diverse and integrated. Talking to one group of people – who were obviously from a variety of cultural backgrounds – what was really funny was that we all celebrate Christmas in some form. Discussing it we decided that it was because it is such a basically nice festival – in terms of family, presents, tree, decorations and food etc and comes coterminous to an extent with Diwali and Hanukah – and we all from our different backgrounds enjoy it.
And that to me is the real integration – that we are all different but can all join in, in our own ways, the same festivities. Very heartwarming!
Lynne Featherstone 
Well said Lynne!I’ve been saying for years its time we got the Christ out of Christmas and returned it to the good old pagan feast where everyone ate, drank and were nice to each other – and could wear silly hats if they were into that kind of thing.The trouble with us pagans is we’re too bloddy liberal to complain about Christians nicking most of our belief system.
Christmas is either ‘coterminous’ with those other festivals or not. It cannot be ‘coterminous to an extent’.What do you mean by ‘coterminous’ anyway? In terms of what they are celebrating, or the time of year that they take place?It is not clear that on either of those levels ‘coterminous’ is really an appropriate description of the relationship between them. Perhaps you could enlighten us?
Well as Lynne has not come back I am glad to help out.While Chritmas is based on the Roman Saturnalia and so, as a sun festival (Jesus and Dad Jehova are sun Gods) it is fixed while Jewish and Islamic festivals are based on the lunar calendar and are moveable (like easter) but usually overlap to a varying degree with the 12 days of Christmas, they can be said to be coterminous to an extent.
JT – they are events at a similar time of the year and there are also some obvious parrallels between them as regards festive and celebratory themes.