Penguins live in the Southern Hemisphere, Polar bears in the Northern Hemisphere, thus it would be impossible for them to ever meet!!
The Polar Foundation has a sweet little animation to show the basic differences between the habitats of the species.
Whoever it was who built the lights - I tried to Google it, but to no avail - was subscribing to the children's myth. Even Happy Feet managed to get it right, showing the penguins approaching giant seal lions, but kept bears out of it! Nigel Marven's recent series over the holiday TV schedules has been very informative about polar bears, though how he ever got so close to them, I don't know! The man has no fear!
Back to Christmas myths - the greatest of all being that Christ's birth is NOT December 25th at all!
The date was chosen to deflect 3rd century Romans from worshipping pagan god Mithras, who was supposed to be born on that date 'The Invincible Sun God'. Snopes, the good old Urban Legends database has a nice little description of this issue and how it was resolved by Emperor Constantine's deathbed conversion to Christianity, making the Roman Empire Christian. So, since AD337, we've celebrated the birth of the Son of God on the Sun god's birthday - neat, huh?
Of course, Pope Gregory later told his missionaries not to tear down the pagan temples of Britain, but to tell the people to sanctify these places to the one True God.
The Scots didn't bother celebrating Christmas until the 1960s! My parents both remember getting their presents on New Year's Day, as 'Suntie Claas' came on Hogmanay night! Was it because of hyper-Calvinistic preference not to celebrate a 'Roman' holiday? No, the Scots were bigger pagans than the romans themselves! They were celebrating using the old Julian calendar right into the late 1800s in some cases, hence Burghead's Clavie ceremony is held on the OLD NEW YEAR - January 11th, rather than the first, since the new calendar was 9 days out of date!
Links for the above-mentioned:
- Mithras
- Burning the Clavie
- Hogmanay
- Hyper-Calvinism (a very good fictional representation of this theological mindset can be found in James Hogg's The Confessions of a Justified Sinner. (One heck of a scary book!)
