Latvian Christmas Quotes

One thing that I find very weird here in Australia is Latvians in Australia celebrate Latvian traditions by a calendar, not by the seasons as they do in Latvia. It’s a bit strange for me, everyone said a few weeks ago, ‘Merry Christmas,’ in Latvian, or maybe Winterfest, and here I was sweating like a pig saying, ‘Merry Winterfest!’ – Viktor Brenners, 2nd Generation DP

Whether animism, the tendency to interact with non-human beings as persons, is the most fundamental state of human ‘religiosity’ is a question beyond the capacity of the historian to answer. But one of the characteristics of the pre-Christian religions considered in this book is an urge to personify concepts and things, from the Sámi’s personification of the twelve days of Christmas as the ‘Christmas people’ to the Latvians’ personification of over a hundred aspects of life as divine ‘mothers’. It is possible to argue that, within Christian worldviews, saints simply took on this role of personifications and there is a long tradition of historians arguing that Europe’s Christianised peasants retained an animist mentality.