and
Animals
The videographer could have spent more time getting more relevant footage of these parrots, but he does show baby green parrots growing up and learning their names from their parents. Parrot squeaks and squawks sound like a lot of noise to humans at first, but, like domestic animals, parrots make a variety of noises and use them to form a simple language that includes an individual parrot's signature noise, which other parrots repeat and use as that parrot's name. Thanks to Elizabeth Barrette for the link..
Holidays
Happy Hanukah to all who observe it. This web site is featuring frivolous Christmas fiction this year because it usually doesn't and because Booktober Blitz sent us virtual crates full of Christmas stories, but we've not forgotten those who observe the rest of the winter holidays. This web site will mention the obscure saints' days, product celebration days, and Internet-generated "there ought to be" days if youall mention serious plans to celebrate them.
Now a question for European readers. Zwart Piet, Black Pete, the given name of the Krampus who travels with St Nicholas and hands out the lumps of coal to those who have not behaved well during the year. He's European, isn't he? Black in the sense of constantly handling coal? I can picture "Black" immigrants to Europe wanting to play his part in pageants, but I've heard distressing reports that the role is being shoved upon them, in a hostile "You're the wrong type to play Santa!" sort of way.
Fact Nicholas lived in Turkey and spoke Greek. Nobody knows what he looked like. He's not one of the saints whose African look was the first thing people noticed about them, like Benedetto the Moor, but where he lived a really white White look would have been conspicuous, too.
Google says this is the oldest known image of St. Nicholas of Myra. It was painted a few hundred years after his lifetime, then displayed in a church where people burned candles. It is hard to be sure, now, what color the painting originally was, but this is what it looks like now.
This thirteenth century artist thought Nicholas might have been White.
This fifteenth century artist thought otherwise.
Quite a few older pictures of Nicholas color his skin dark (and some of his clothing light enough that we can tell he's not been "blackened" by candle smoke alone). While the artists had never seen Nicholas and probably were using their imagination to interpret an oral tradition, at least we know that tradition is not being violated when Black men dress up as Santa Claus.
He did not have a wife. Some medieval churches allowed priests to be married. Not his. But when American women want to dress up as Santa Claus, we have a late tradition that married Santa Claus to a lady whose name was Mary Christmas before she became Mrs. Claus. This, like the Zwart Piet tradition, is not historical, but it doesn't pretend to be.
Zazzle
Here's the link for the State Postcards, of which there are now four.
For some States nobody else seems to have thought of putting a butterfly on the postcard. When we think of Alaska we don't think of butterflies, although butterflies flutter around Anchorage in summer. For some States, like California, there are lots of other butterfly designs. Here's a monarch picture that I wish were mine, or were free stock!
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