A star, a star! Was Jesus a Gemini?: Xmas miscellany
Some astronomers believe that Jesus was actually born around June 17, 2 B.C., when a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter would have made the planets appear as a single “beacon of light” — the star the Wise Men followed to the stable.
When Dickens’ A Christmas Carol appeared in 1843, the holiday was “a relatively minor affair that ranked far below Easter.” See NPR’s excerpt from Les Standiford’s The Man Who Invented Christmas.
In “a cross between the nativity and one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories,” Jeanette Winterson reimagines the nativity story from the donkey’s perspective.
