The story I was brought up on about the Christmas tree was that when St Boniface, one of the early English missionaries to Germany, cut down a pagan sacred oak he told its worshippers that rather than bowing to perishable things they should worship Christ, whose mercy is ever green, as symbolised by a small fir tree growing among the roots of the oak.
However Willibald's Life of Boniface, unlike "The Ladybird Book of Christmas Customs", only has the cutting-down bit so it looks like the rest of the story accreted later.
I decorate my potted palm anyway. It stays green for me all year no matter how I neglect it and doesn't drop needles in my food, so it deserves a bit of glamour.
There's a "these" missing from my previous post. Urgh. Who said what about writing in English? Re-lurking, embarrassed.
Teresa wrote: "For all I know, translating Mayakovsky is a traditional amusement at Scottish universities, the same way translators use "Jabberwocky" as a chew-toy of the mind."
There certainly was a period in the mid-c20th when it seems every Scottish poet and his/her Auntie Maisie was producing Scots translations of the Russian poets. MacDiarmid probably started it - whole chunks of "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" are (fairly loose, I suspect) translations of Russian poems - and others took up the baton from him. Mostly they were working outside the university environment though.
I don't know why the Russian poets should be particularly attractive (though some Scottish poets, Morgan among them, have translated from other languages too) but what intrigues me is the tendency many of translators show to put other poets' work into Scots even if they use more or less standard English in their own. (In fact, down here among the Great Unpublished I found myself doing the same thing when I had a go at translating some Prevert. I can't quite explain it: Scots just felt right.) I'd be curious to know if the same happens in other literatures with a "regional" and a "standard" version of the language (and people here would know, I imagine, if anybody does).
De-lurking briefly to ask Teresa: is the Scots Mayakovsky the one by Edwin Morgan?
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