What’s Special About December 28?

A king/emperor may kill all his enemies, but he cannot outsmart history or destiny.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

This piece of writing contains 418 words. It will take you about 3 minutes to read.

Key Messages

• Today is Childermas
• A story of Kings killing innocent children
• Famous death — Susan Sontag

We are in the Yuletide, or Christmas season. After Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and a money-burning Boxing Day that followed, some people get back to work, while some lucky dogs continue to enjoy a long holiday through New Year’s Day.

Holy Innocents Day

As if people needed a legitimate reason to celebrate every day during the 12-day holiday (Dec 24-Jan 6), today is also known as Holy Innocents Day, or the Feast of the Holy Innocents, to commemorate the innocent children killed by King Herod in his quest to find baby Jesus.

The Holy Innocents Day is thus also called Childermas.

Childermas is a funny-looking word.

Christmas was written as Christes masse in old English, meaning Mass of Christ. Later, the word Mass became a suffix meaning festival, hence Christmas (Christ + Mass).

Similarly, Candlemas on February 2, another essential holy day in memory of the Holy Marry, indicate the day must have much to do with candles.

The word Childermas makes me associate it with the German word kinder, where the suffix -er indicates plural.

And indeed, according to Wiktionary, childer used to mean children in Ireland, plural of the word child.

That makes sense, as it is what it means.

Reference: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Feast-of-the-Holy-Innocents

Speaking of King Herod’s killing of innocent children, similar things had happened in different cultures.

Take China’s Tang Dynasty, for example.

Legend has it that after learning from the royal prophet (fortune teller) that a person with the surname of Wu would one day overthrow the dynasty, the emperor ordered the killing of all the infants surnamed Wu immediately. The emperor thought this would have eradicated the potential threat to the thrones.

But only those boys with the family name of Wu were killed, and all the girls spared — who would have thought a woman would one day become the emperor of the most powerful country in the world then?

One of the baby girls, surnamed Wu, later ascended the thrones to establish her dynasty of Zhou and became the first the only empress (female emperor) in Chinese history.

Reference — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Zetian#Empress_dowager

What’s the moral?

A king/emperor may kill all his enemies, but he cannot outsmart history or destiny.

• People will find a reason to celebrate any day.

Photo by Charu Chaturvedi on Unsplash

Famous death on December 28

Susan Sontag, the American writer, and philosopher died on December 28, 2004, at age 71.

“Life is a movie; death is a photograph.” — Susan Sontag.

The most famous book of Susan Sontag: On Photography (1977)

Reference — New York Public Library — Where to Start with Susan Sontag

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