Amazing Appetizers For New Year’s Eve

 

Jesus in Japan, Who Knew?

There seems to be an effort to rebrand or reintroduce Jesus these days, we thought we would help out, introducing another narrative found in Japan.

Ok, the story goes like this: in a small village, called Shingo in the north of Japan is where Jesus Christ lived and eventually died, leaving behind his descendants.

According to the story, Jesus travelled to Japan at the age of 21 to study theology, spent 12 years in the country during a period that's not written about in the New Testament.

After returning to Jerusalem, and getting into trouble with the Romans, he somehow convinced his younger brother Isukiri to face the trial and crucifixion. 

As Jesus skips town, no one notices it’s a different person and his younger brother dies on the cross instead. 

Jesus then fled back to Japan, which involved a four year journey spanning 6,000 miles.

He became known as Daitenku Taro Jurai to locals, and lived in Shingo in exile, growing garlic.

Jesus fell in love with a farmer's daughter called Miyuko, and they married and had three children.

He is believed to have died in the village at the age of 106.

New Year’s

In 46 B.C. E. Julius Caesar introduced a new, solar-based calendar.

The old calendar had become out of sync over the years. 

This new Julian calendar began the new year with January 1. 

Within the Roman world, January 1 would become the consistently observed start of the new year. 

Sacrifices were made to Janus, gifts and visits were exchanged, along with masquerading and feasting.

Not everyone found this observance acceptable. 

The early Catholic Church condemned the festivities as paganism. 

“Participation in the ordinary New Year’s Day observances as well as in the Saturnalia of December was from the first discouraged by the Church. Christians were expected to spend the day in quiet meditation, reading of Scripture and acts of charity”.

During the Middle Ages, the Church remained opposed to celebrating New Years. 

But as Christianity became more widespread, the early church began melding its religious observances and dates with other pagan celebrations of the day, and New Year’s Day was no exception. 

As far as resolutions go, the ancient Babylonians are said to have been the first people to make New Year’s resolutions, some 4,000 years ago. 

They were also the first to hold recorded celebrations in honor of the new year—though for them the year began not in January but in mid-March, when the crops were planted. 

During a massive 12-day religious festival known as Akitu, the Babylonians crowned a new king or reaffirmed their loyalty to the reigning king. 

They also made promises to the gods to pay their debts and return any objects they had borrowed. 

These promises could be considered the beginnings of our New Year’s resolutions. 

If the Babylonians kept to their word, their (pagan) gods would bestow favor on them for the coming year. 

If not, they would fall out of the gods’ favor—and nobody wanted that.

In Rome, Janus, the two-faced god whose spirit inhabited doorways and arches, January had special significance for the Romans. 

Believing that Janus symbolically looked backwards into the previous year and ahead into the future, the Romans offered sacrifices to the deity and made promises of good conduct for the coming year.

Cranberry Juice and Infections

The rise of antibiotic resistance has the medical field concerned.

So a good look at cranberry juice to reduce the risk of urinary tract infections is being applauded by doctors.

Global leaders in infectious diseases met in London to discuss how cranberry juice could potentially have positive results preventing and treating common infections.

The new research discovered a daily glass of cranberry juice could be help decrease use of antibiotics.

The study, published by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed a nearly 40 per cent reduction of symptomatic UTIs in women who consumed one glass of cranberry juice a day. 

These infections are the second most common reason for prescriptions, but there is a resistance to antibiotics and the everyday treatments no longer effective.

Is it serious? UK Chancellor George Osborne warned that unless action is taken, 'antimicrobial resistance will become an even greater threat to mankind than cancer currently is'. 

Speaking at the event, Dr Nathalie Tufenkji, event panelist and Canada Research Chair in Biocolloids and Surfaces, said: 'The growing spread of antibiotic resistance could undermine decades of work. We need to find alternative treatment strategies for infections.'

Very interesting that once again nature may hold the answers to many medical questions.

We would like to remind everyone, "we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. When we reconnect with nature, we’ve reconnected with ourselves."

Nature has invested almost 4 billion years creating the perfect answer for every question or challenge humans can come up with.