“The Christkindl, the Christmas Fairy, is a cherished
highlight during the Holiday Tree Lighting. The Christmas Fairy
proclaims the opening of Christkindlmarket Chicago.”

Also from the official Chicago Christkindl website:

In its English version, the Nuremberg website calls the alleged “Christmas Fairy” an angel:

“The Nuremberg Christmas Angel with her white and
golden dress, long blond curls and her golden crown, has been the
symbol for the Christmas Market for many decades. During Advent time,
the Christmas Angel is the most important representative of the city
and of the traditional Christmas Market.

Every year, on the
Friday before the first Advent Sunday, the Nuremberg Christmas Angel
opens the Nuremberg Christmas Market by reciting a solemn prologue.”

The German version of the Nuremberg site calls the Christmas Angel the Christkind
(Christ Child).  This confusion of the Christ Child with a
supernatural bringer of gifts– hence, later, an angel, and, in Chicago,
a fairy– is said to have originated with Martin Luther.

From a Radio Deutsche Welle website–

Nuremberg, City of Angels–

The making of a myth

 

The Christkind
was originally introduced in the 16th century by religious reformer
Martin Luther.  Until then, it was always Saint Nicholas who
brought gifts on Dec. 6.  But as Protestants can’t have saints,
Luther needed a new Christmas tradition for his followers. “Luther
wanted to move the gift-giving away from the Catholic holiday on Dec.
6,” said Nuremberg tourism manager Michael Weber. “So he reinvented the
tradition for Protestants by moving it to Christmas Eve and making the Christkind– really, the baby Jesus– the person who brought the gifts.”

 

It was under the rule of the National Socialists that the image of today’s Christkind
was ultimately anchored in the collective German mind.  They built
on Nuremberg’s tradition of producing tinsel angels, and in 1933, had a
young girl in an angel costume open the city’s Christmas Market for the
first time.  After the second World War, Nuremberg’s tinsel angels
became simply the Nuremberg Christkind, and the figures were sold
nation-wide. 

Here is the banner for the Nuremberg site:

  The banner reads:
“Nuremberg Christkindlesmarkt–
Where the Christ Child
is at home“

Maybe.

“What
on earth is
   a ‘concrete universal’?”

– Said to be an annotation
(undated)
by Robert M. Pirsig of
A History of Philosophy,
by Frederick Copleston,
Society of Jesus.


For an answer, see
“The Structure of the

in Literature,”
by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.,

PMLA,
Vol. 62,
No. 1
(March, 1947),

pp. 262-280.

This is reprinted in Wimsatt’s
The Verbal Icon:
Studies in the
Meaning of Poetry.

The final chapter of
The Verbal Icon
is titled
“Poetry and Christian Thinking.”
For more on Wimsatt
and this topic, see
“Reclaiming the Bible
as Literature,”
by Louis A. Markos.

Related material from March 2004:
Anschaulichkeit (3/16) and
Readings for St. Patrick’s Day.

“For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross.”
– Thomas Pynchon,
Gravity’s Rainbow

Geometry
from Point
to Hyperspace

by Steven H. Cullinane

 
Euclid is “the most famous
geometer ever known
and for good reason:
 
for millennia it has been
his window
 
that people first look through
when they view geometry.”

 
– Euclid’s Window:
The Story of Geometry
from Parallel Lines
to Hyperspace,

by Leonard Mlodinow

“…the source of
all great mathematics
is
the special case,
the concrete example.
It is frequent in mathematics
that every instance of a
  concept of
seemingly
great generality is
in essence the same as
a small and concrete
special case.”

– Paul Halmos in
I Want To Be a Mathematician

Euclid’s geometry deals with affine
spaces of 1, 2, and 3 dimensions
definable over the field
of real numbers.

Each of these spaces
has infinitely many points.

Some simpler spaces are those
defined over a finite field–
i.e., a “Galois” field–
for
instance, the field
which has only two
elements, 0 and 1, with
addition and multiplication
as follows:

From these five finite spaces,
we may, in accordance with
Halmos’s advice,

select as “a small and
concrete special case”
the 4-point affine plane,
which we may call

Galois’s Window.

The interior lines of the picture

are by no means irrelevant to
the space’s structure, as may be
seen by examining the cases of
the above Galois affine 3-space
and Galois affine hyperplane

in greater detail.

For more on these cases, see

The Eightfold Cube,

Finite Relativity,

The Smallest Projective Space,

Latin-Square Geometry, and

Geometry of the 4×4 Square.

(These documents assume that
the reader is familar with the
distinction between affine and
projective geometry.)

These 8- and 16-point spaces
may be used to
illustrate the action of Klein’s
simple group of order 168
and the action of
a subgroup of 322,560 elements

within the large Mathieu group.

The view from Galois’s window

also includes aspects of

quantum information theory.

For links to some papers
in this area, see
  Elements of Finite Geometry.

“Who knows where madness lies?”
– Rhetorical question
in “Man of La Mancha”
(See previous entry.)

Using madness to
seek out madness, let us
  consult today’s numbers…

Pennsylvania Lottery
Nov. 22, 2006:

Mid-day 487
Evening 814

The number 487 leads us to
page 487 in the
May 1977 PMLA,
“The Form of Carnival

in Under the Volcano“:

“The printing presses’ flywheel
marks the whirl of time*
    that will split La Despedida….”

Flywheel

From Dana Grove,
A Rhetorical Analysis of
Under the Volcano,
page 92:

The Narnia Chronicles

“Beyond Belief”:

This was the name of a

Nov. 5-7 conference on
the religion of Scientism

described in today’s

New York Times.

Beyond Despair:

 

Doonesbury 11/21/06

For some, art serves as
an alternative to both
traditional religion and
the religion of Scientism.

See, for instance, the Log24
entries on All Hallows’ Eve
in both 2005 and 2006.