December in Japan

 

Like many countries, Japan uses a 12-month calendar. The names used are very simple. January is literally "Month one" 一月, February is "Month two" 二月, and so on. However, before the Meiji Restoration (mid-1800s), an older 12-month system was common. These months’ names referenced the weather and the seasons, similar to how we name the Full Moons.

December is 師走. The kanji (I think that is the correct term for an ideogram) 師 can refer to a teacher, or a mentor, often in a religious sense. In this context, it means a monk. The second ideogram is 走 which means "running." So, this December literally means "monks running."   

But why? 

In December, monks are very busy preparing for the New Year's festival, so this last month of the year is "the month of running monks."

Chrismukkah

By Jonah Green - Flickr: Hanukkah bush, CC BY 2.0, Link

Chrismukkah is a pop-culture portmanteau neologism referring to the merging of the holidays of Christianity's Christmas and Judaism's Hanukkah. 

The term was popularized beginning in December 2003 by the TV drama The O.C., in which the character Seth Cohen creates the holiday to signify his upbringing in an interfaith household with a Jewish father and Protestant mother. 

The holiday can also be adopted by all-Jewish households that celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday.

The term first arose in the German-speaking countries among middle-class Jews in the 19th century. 

After World War II, Chrismukkah became particularly popular in the United States but is also celebrated in other countries.

For a deeper and more personal take on this, see my post today on Weekends in Paradelle. 

tempest in a teapot and variations

 

German artist Carl Guttenberg's 1778 engraving of an exploding teapot to represent the American Revolution. Father Time, on the right, flashes a magic lantern picture of an exploding teapot to America on the left and Britannia on the right, with British and American forces advancing towards each other.

Tempest in a teapot (American English), or storm in a teacup (British English), or tempest in a teacup, are all idioms meaning a small event that has been exaggerated out of proportion. There are also lesser-known or earlier variants, such as storm in a cream bowl, tempest in a glass of water, storm in a wash-hand basin, and storm in a glass of water. We find the French une tempête dans un verre d'eau (a storm in a glass of water) and Chinese: 茶杯裡的風波、;  茶壺裡的風暴 (winds and waves in a teacup; storm in a teapot)

The etymology appears to go way back to Cicero in the first century BC. In his De Legibus, he used a similar phrase in Latin, possibly the precursor to the modern expressions, Excitabat enim fluctus in simpulo ut dicitur Gratidius, which is translated as "For Gratidius raised a tempest in a ladle, as the saying is."

One of the earliest occurrences in print of the modern version is in 1815, where Britain's Lord Chancellor Thurlow, sometime during his tenure of 1783–1792, is quoted as referring to a popular uprising on the Isle of Man as a "tempest in a teapot."

Lord North, Prime Minister of Great Britain, is credited for popularizing this phrase as characterizing the outbreak of American colonists against the tax on tea. This was satirized in Carl Guttenberg's 1778 engraving of the Tea-Tax Tempest (shown above).