Talk:Christmas ham

message: Wouldn't the Christmas ham be an ancient Roman tradition in honor of god Saturn, later adopted elsewhere too but forgotten in most parts? Petteri Punakuono 03:51, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Saturn

message: The recipe should bot be here, but rather in the Wikicookbook. Recipes do not belong in Wikipedia. Israelite9191 05:37, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Recipe

message: I only found this from the net, it has been verified by archealogical findings of pig bones from the sites of worship that Tammuz was celebrated by eating pig - as has been verified by archealogical findings that the ancient builders of Stonehenge ate boar - do not have the magazine or English historical books available:
However, Tammuz and the religious sacrifices is common knowledge which even I with my bad memory remember from school history lessons.
From an April 14, 2003 article by Lowell Ponte in FrontPageMagazine.com:
“…In the religious mythology of ancient Mesopotamia are found Tammuz, lover of the goddess of love and sex Ishtar (one of several related names of Euro-Mediterranean pagan goddesses – Astarte, Ashtoreth, Isis, Eostre – who may be the namesake for Easter). 
Tammuz at age 40 was killed by a wild boar, but as a deity of vegetation he is restored to life each springtime. At this time of year in the ancient Middle East, women would weep for 40 days over the death of Tammuz, a pagan practice that the Prophet Ezekiel warned (Ezekiel 8:14-15) was happening next to God’s temple in Jerusalem.
The lover of Tammuz, Ishtar (daughter of the Moon god Sin) had arrived on Earth inside a giant moon egg that spashed down in the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia. (Thus it was taught in the Ishtar cult mythology of the ancient Queen Semiramis.)
Ishtar was accompanied by a hare (mistakenly called a rabbit) that had been a bird before she magically transformed it into a symbol of fertility and fecundity, a proto-Playboy Bunny. This magical bunny retained its birdlike ability to lay eggs.
And so it was that in the ancient pagan Middle East, springtime was celebrated by people giving one another brightly-colored eggs. They made baskets of river reeds to carry these eggs and spring lilies. Women wore new hats shaped like what we call bonnets. They ate hotbreads stamped with the X-symbol of Ishtar (Jeremiah 44:17). Bunnies were a symbol of Ishtar, whose worship took the form of ritual prostitution. 
Those not under Jewish Kosher laws ate ham to end the weeping 40 day “Month of Tammuz,” thereby symbolically devouring the beast that killed Tammuz. And on that celebratory morning early in the fourth month of the year, men and women would look to the east and celebrate the rising of the Sun God, another pagan act beside the Temple condemned by Ezekiel (Ezekiel 8:16). 
You might notice some parallels here – to Easter eggs and their roll on the White House lawn, to Easter ham, to Easter lilies and baskets and bonnets and bunnies. Lent, like the weeping for Tammuz, lasts 40 days leading up to this celebration of resurrection. Many churches in a few days will be holding “Easter sunrise services,” even though Christian scripture says nothing about sunrise as the women go to Jesus’ tomb. Celebrating the sunrise in this way is not Christian; it is from ancient pagan Mesopotamia.”
So, Lazarus Sunday replaced Tammuz’s rite of spring and Lent was reinvented from its original cultural identity as a women’s lament for the loss of Ishtar’s potent lover; eating a cured ham was a ritualized form of revenge against the species that devoured poor Tammuz; the Easter bunny was an icon of a metamorphosis from an ancient egg-laying (pre-historic?) bird…apparently, “easter bonnets” were worn in Mesopotamia but I’m going to have to do some more research to find out about the ritualized prostitution…that’s one activity which doean’t seem to have survived the pagan-to-Christian transition, although one suspects the puritans hated Easter’s ‘wantonness’ & attavistic pagan connotations.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by IndianaJonesy (talk • contribs) 11:15, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hello there. Please keep in mind that this information is about a specific custom in Scandinavia and in England by way of Scandinavia. I don't think it's problematic to state that your source above states that pig bones were consumed at stone henge and it's theorized that pigs were consumed on the winter solstice. However, this ham we're talking about is a specific cultural custom seemingly brought to England by the Anglo-Saxons. Obviously, pig consumption in Northern Europe did not originate amongst the Germanic tribes. :bloodofox: (talk) 12:16, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Stonehenge

message: I'm not inclined to believe the claims this article makes about Christmas ham being a pagan leftover. First of all: pork has been an important source of meat for a long time in Scandinavia. While it is possible that there is an unbroken tradition to feast on pork around Christmas, this does not mean that the Christmas ham can not be a later introduction.
As it is, this claim is supported by three sources: one is a folklorist from the beginning of the last century, while the other two does not appear to deal with the Christmas ham at all, but rather the boar's head (which is interesting when considering the :sv:julhös, but is about as far from the ham you can get on the pig). None of these are written by food historians.
I can say that at least Marja Hartola, in Magnus Gröntoft (ed), Biskop Brasks måltider notes that "lutfish is the only dish that has been served at Christmas for over 500 years in Scandinavia, and one of very few tradional dishes left from Medieval times". This contradicts the claims made here.
Andejons (talk) 19:09, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Completely agree. Connecting the eating of boar's head to the Christmas ham is pure WP:SYNTH. The cited article does not mention ham even once. Ham is, after all, a cured product typically made from domestic pig. Boar is a wild animal, and its meat is not usually cured. I have removed the material about pagan connections and boar's head because there is not a scintilla of evidence in the cited sources that connects Christmas ham to them. --Macrakis (talk) 18:18, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

text: Agree. I just noticed that (substantially) the same material as you removed is also found at Boar's Head Carol. I have removed it. William Avery (talk) 17:16, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  From pagan times? 

message: Isn't the Christmas actually in the middle of the Australian summer rather than beginning of the summer? For example in the Northern hemisphere the midsummer is spent around the June solstice.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mikko.nummelin (talk • contribs) 23:19, 25 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Australia and December solstice 

message: The article read:
: Pope Sixtus III insisted in 435 that Christians should eat pork on Christmas to make a difference to the Jews, for which pork is forbidden.
The source is a newspaper article about using leftover ham, a very weak source for such a strong claim. I have tried to find corroboration for this claim elsewhere, and haven't succeeded. In fact, there was a pork dole from over a century before Sixtus, before Christianity became official. I have removed this claim. Of course, if someone founds a solid source, it should go back in. --Macrakis (talk) 20:41, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Pope Sixtus III claim