Working in Montréal today --No Donkeys

Good morning folks,  I will be working in Montréal today and the fabled land of Ooo-TAW-wa tomorrow.  Yes, a bit early for the email, caught the 7:30 out of YYZ.

Do you know who the Master of Hohenfurth is?  That's okay, it is an obscure reference to the more broadly known Master of Vyšši :)  This guy, who's actual name we have not a clue.. was an active painter in the 1300s.  He painted a number of Christ centric works, Nativity, Annunciation, Adoration, Resurrection, who whole gamut.

If one views the Cycle de la vie de Jésus one will observe a donkey, cow, some goats, oxen, what may be a pack of dogs and oddly.. what I think is an armadillo.  Also surrounding the baby Jesus is a number of persons presumably a mixture of wise and not so wisemen and possibly some traveling buskers.

Now this and other depictions of the nativity are based on the written accounts of Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the insignificant?) a monk from the mid 500s that brought us the birth date of Christ and a revised calendar.

But get this.. In what has been a recurring theme in my weekly emails, he made a MISCALCULATION in the dates.  According to Pope Benedict, in a recently published book -Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, the actual date of birth was not December 25 (Thanks for clearing that up there Pontiff, we already suspected as much) and the year was earlier, perhaps as many as 7 years earlier!

But I and you likely don't care, although it may have an effect of subsequent calculations of exactly when the end of the 13th B'ak'tun will occur.  But more importantly, he asserts that there were no oxen.

No oxen?!

Nope.  And no other animals either. Not even that donkey with the look on his face that he has seen what cannot be unseen.

If this was your anchor, the building block of your faith, the foothold of your doctrine, the leash to your dogma, the tenets of your faith.. yeah.. sorry for bringing it up, hope I have not spoiled your Christmas plans.

Have a good day, blame the Pagans.