Photo of the day: A Nigerian Father Christmas posing with his "I-pass-my-neighbour" generator LOL!

With the recent irregularity in power supply in Nigeria and today being Christmas Day, a man wearing a Father Christmas costume decided to pose with his generator, showing that even on a merry day as this, there is no NEPA light. LOL!

Nigeria's President, Muhammadu Buhari's Christmas message to Nigerians

In the spirit of Christmas, The President of The Federal Republic of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, has delivered a message to Nigerians. Read below:

I felicitate with all Nigerians, especially our Christian brothers and sisters, on the joyous occasion of this year’s Christmas. On this occasion of the commemoration of the birth of Jesus Christ, let us all rededicate ourselves to the virtues of peace, love, honesty, justice, equity, piety, humility and service to others which he taught. 

There can be no doubt that a greater manifestation of these virtues and ideals in our lives will immensely help us to become a more united, peaceful, secure and progressive nation.

Let us also reach out in love and compassion to fellow Nigerians who are in distress at this period of our nation’s history.

I particularly urge you all to remember victims of terrorism and insurgency in the country, especially Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).

The Federal Government will continue to collaborate with state governments and other stakeholders to ease the harsh conditions in IDP camps, while the ultimate objective remains to quickly put an end to insurgency and return the IDPs to their homes.

We must never again allow any group to hold the nation to ransom under whatever guise.

Let us also not allow current socio-economic and security challenges to dampen our expectations for a better Nigeria.

This administration has taken a number of measures to restore hope to our people. The 2016 Budget defines our commitment to giving Nigeria a new lease of life.

Our change slogan is not a campaign gimmick but a promise that must be kept. We are determined to bring about tangible changes in the lives of our people.

In this regard, efforts will be intensified to recover stolen funds, block revenue leakages and enthrone due process, transparency and accountability.

Public office is a public trust that must be held to the highest ethical standards.

I wish all Nigerians a Merry Christmas.

Please drive carefully.

MUHAMMADU BUHARI

If only he lived by example and openly is a doer of his own words.

Photo: Christmas Day in Badagry, Nigeria, in 1923

Check out the pose in this picture. I'm pretty sure the guys posing on the ground are from Ibadan!. LOL!. Goes to show that the awkward posing we see today in some pictures goes way back.

Final change: June Ndukwe's Blog to Naija Vampire Blog

What's wrong with her?
Is she even serious?
How long is she going to continue changing changing changing?

I know. Those are some of the questions that must be crossing your mind as your read this. Thing is, I didn't think about this until some days ago. I was like, heyyyyy!, why didn't I just change it from KayJay's Korner to Naija Vampire?. Well...I didn't think about it at the time. Truth is, it didn't even stroll through my mind until a few days ago and you will not guess where I was when I had the idea...well, maybe you guessed right...I was in the toilet. Shyting hehehe!. Was just busy doing my thing when it dawned on me. Now I feel like even I am not serious sef. I should have thought about it a lot more before going ahead to make it official, posting and putting it out there.

I'm sorry, guys!. Yeah, I feel like I should apologize because it might get a little confusing and tiring but don't give up on me because of this. Big concepts went through this stage of indecision before they became what they are today and I believe I am one of them.

So, in the spirit of Christmas and the celebration of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, let's please embrace this change whose intention is for the best.

Merry Christmas! *kisses*

The Birth of Jesus Christ: Born, Growing and Living in You

‘Let it be to me according to your word.’

Luke 1:38

The story of the virgin birth illustrates how close God wants to get to us. In a sense He’s asking you the same question He asked Mary: ‘Are you willing to let Me in?’. Just as Mary conceived the Christ Child, Jesus can be born in you and live His life through you. What an amazing thought. What a privilege!

Paul prayed ‘…that Christ may dwell in your hearts…’ (Ephesians 3:17 NIV 2011 Edition). John said, ‘Those who obey…live in him, and he in them’ (1 John 3:24 NIV 1984 Edition). Jesus promised, ‘If anyone…opens the door, I will come in’ (Revelation 3:20 NIV 2011 Edition).

All God asks is an invitation and an open heart. God was with Adam in the garden. He was with Abraham and called him His friend. But as a redeemed child of God, Jesus is in you. And He will keep growing in you until He comes out in your words, your attitudes, your lifestyle, and the choices you make each day.

Are you struggling with bitterness? Or worry? Or unforgiveness? Or bad habits? ...

Since Jesus lives in you, you have access to His awesome power. That’s why Paul talks about ‘striving according to His power, which mightily works within me’ (Colossians 1:29 NASB). God isn’t looking for great talent, He’s looking for simple trust. Mary must have felt overwhelmed and inadequate when she heard what God had in mind for her. Nevertheless she said, ‘Let it be to me according to your word.’

Do you want to have a great Christmas? Make that your prayer too.

Zech 5-6, Rev 17

Why is Christmas Day on the 25th December?

Christmas is celebrated to remember the birth of of Jesus Christ, who Christians believe is the Son of God.

The name 'Christmas' comes from the Mass of Christ (or Jesus). A Mass service (which is sometimes called Communion or Eucharist) is where Christians remember that Jesus died for us and then came back to life. The 'Christ-Mass' service was the only one that was allowed to take place after sunset (and before sunrise the next day), so people had it at Midnight! So we get the name Christ-Mass, shortened to Christmas.

Christmas is now celebrated by people around the world, whether they are Christians or not. It's a time when family and friends come together and remember the good things they have. People, and especially children, also like Christmas as it's a time when you give and receive presents!

The Date of Christmas
No one knows the real birthday of Jesus! No date is given in the Bible, so why do we celebrate it on the 25th December? The early Christians certainly had many arguments as to when it should be celebrated! Also, the birth of Jesus probably didn't happen in the year 1AD but slightly earlier, somewhere between 2BC and 7BC (there isn't a 0AD - the years go from 1BC to 1AD!).

The first recorded date of Christmas being celebrated on December 25th was in 336AD, during the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine (he was the first Christian Roman Emperor). A few years later, Pope Julius I officially declared that the birth of Jesus would be celebrated on the 25th December.

There are many different traditions and theories as to why Christmas is celebrated on December 25th. A very early Christian tradition said that the day when Mary was told that she would have a very special baby, Jesus (called the Annunciation) was on March 25th - and it's still celebrated today on the 25th March. Nine months after the 25th March is the 25th December! March 25th was also the day some early Christians thought the world had been made, and also the day that Jesus died on when he was an adult.

December 25th might have also been chosen because the Winter Solstice and the ancient pagan Roman midwinter festivals called 'Saturnalia' and 'Dies Natalis Solis Invicti' took place in December around this date - so it was a time when people already celebrated things.

The Winter Solstice is the day where there is the shortest time between the sun rising and the sun setting. It happens on December 21st or 22nd. To pagans this meant that the winter was over and spring was coming and they had a festival to celebrate it and worshipped the sun for winning over the darkness of winter. In Scandinavia, and some other parts of northern Europe, the Winter Solstice is known as Yule and is where we get Yule Logs from. In Eastern europe the mid-winter festival is called Koleda.

The Roman Festival of Saturnalia took place between December 17th and 23rd and honoured the Roman god Saturn. Dies Natalis Solis Invicti means 'birthday of the unconquered sun' and was held on December 25th (when the Romans thought the Winter Solstice took place) and was the 'birthday' of the Pagan Sun god Mithra. In the pagan religion of Mithraism, the holy day was Sunday and is where get that word from!

Early Christians might have given this festival a new meaning - to celebrate the birth of the Son of God 'the unconquered Son'! (In the Bible a prophesy about the Jewish savior, who Christians believe is Jesus, is called 'Sun of Righteousness'.)

The Jewish festival of Lights, Hanukkah starts on the 25th of Kislev (the month in the Jewish calendar that occurs at about the same time as December). Hanukkah celebrates when the Jewish people were able to re-dedicate and worship in their Temple, in Jerusalem, again following many years of not being allowed to practice their religion.

Jesus was a Jew, so this could be another reason that helped the early Church choose December the 25th for the date of Christmas!

Christmas had also been celebrated by the early Church on January 6th, when they also celebrated the Epiphany (which means the revelation that Jesus was God's son) and the Baptism of Jesus. Now Epiphany mainly celebrates the visit of the Wise Men to the baby Jesus, but back then it celebrated both things! Jesus's Baptism was originally seen as more important than his birth, as this was when he started his ministry. But soon people wanted a separate day to celebrate his birth.

Most of the world uses the 'Gregorian Calendar' implemented by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. Before that the 'Roman' or Julian Calendar was used (named after Julius Caesar). The Gregorian calendar is more accurate that the Roman calendar which had too many days in a year! When the switch was made 10 days were lost, so that the day that followed the 4th October 1582 was 15th October 1582. In the UK the change of calendars was made in 1752. The day after 2nd September 1752 was 14th September 1752.

Many Orthodox and Coptic Churches still use the Julian Calendar and so celebrate Christmas on the 7th January (which is when December 25th would have been on the Julian calendar). And the Armenian Apostolic Church celebrates it on the 6th January! In some part of the UK, January 6th is still called 'Old Christmas' as this would have been the day that Christmas would have celebrated on, if the calendar hadn't been changed. Some people didn't want to use the new calendar as they thought it 'cheated' them out of 11 days!

Christians believe that Jesus is the light of the world, so the early Christians thought that this was the right time to celebrate the birth of Jesus. They also took over some of the customs from the Winter Solstice and gave them Christian meanings, like Holly, Mistletoe and even Christmas Carols!

St Augustine was the person who really started Christmas in the UK by introducing Christianity in the 6th century. He came from countries that used the Roman Calendar, so western countries celebrate Christmas on the 25th December. Then people from Britain and Western Europe took Christmas on the 25th December all over the world!

So when was Jesus Born?
There's a strong and practical reason why Jesus might not have been born in the winter, but in the spring or the autumn! It can get very cold in the winter and it's unlikely that the shepherds would have been keeping sheep out on the hills (as those hills can get quite a lot of snow sometimes!).

During the spring (in March or April) there's a Jewish festival called 'Passover'. This festival remembers when the Jews had escaped from slavery in Egypt about 1500 years before Jesus was born. Lots of lambs would have been needed during the Passover Festival, to be sacrificed in the Temple in Jerusalem. Jews from all over the Roman Empire travelled to Jerusalem for the Passover Festival, so it would have been a good time for the Romans to take a census. Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem for the census (Bethlehem is about six miles from Jerusalem).

In the autumn (in September or October) there's the Jewish festival of 'Sukkot' or 'The Feast of Tabernacles'. It's the festival that's mentioned the most times in the Bible! It is when Jewish people remember that they depended on God for all they had after they had escaped from Egypt and spent 40 years in the desert. It also celebrates the end of the harvest. During the festival, Jews live outside in temporary shelters (the word 'tabernacle' come from a latin word meaning 'booth' or 'hut').

Many people who have studied the Bible, think that Sukkot would be a likely time for the birth of Jesus as it might fit with the description of there being 'no room in the inn'. It also would have been a good time to take the Roman Census as many Jews went to Jerusalem for the festival and they would have brought their own tents/shelters with them! (It wouldn't have been practical for Joseph and Mary to carry their own shelter as Mary was pregnant.)

The possibilities for the Star of Bethlehem seems to point either spring or autumn.

So whenever you celebrate Christmas, remember that you're celebrating a real event that happened about 2000 years ago, that God sent his Son into the world as a Christmas present for everyone!

As well as Christmas and the solstice, there are some other festivals that are held in late December. Hanukkah is celebrated by Jews; and the festival of Kwanzaa is celebrated by some Africans and African Americans takes place from December 26th to January 1st.

Culled from whychristmas.com

The city where it is Christmas every day

Yiwu wholesale market is the centre of the world's supply or Christmas decorations

In the Chinese city of Yiwu, Christmas comes 365 days a year. But you have to look for it.

Yiwu could be anywhere in workaday urban China. It is a smoggy, swarming, unremarkable place some 300km (186 miles) south of Shanghai. Except for one thing - a series of vast halls that constitute what is claimed to be the world's biggest wholesale market. That's where Christmas happens every day, even if most Chinese people themselves do not really believe in it. There's nothing grand about it - but inside the utilitarian buildings there's a dazzling cornucopia of festive stuff ready for the world's consumers. There are hundreds of booths, with thousands of different glittering things to buy by dozen, or the hundreds, or the container load. There are cascades of plastic flowers, and batteries of singing Santas, there are life-sized reindeers, and twinkling LED garlands in more colours than a rainbow. There are dozens of cuddly soft toy stalls, with characters bearing a peculiar familiarity to well-known global trademarks.

There are ribbons and baubles, and lights everywhere. Dazzled, the eye does not know where to look, what to take in. You amble on, floor after floor of glittering stuff ready for the export market. Each of the more than 60,000 booths seems to represent a separate business. Each of them specialises in a very particular product, often from far away factories. It's not just toys and baubles. There are hundreds of booths of festive gloves and hats, tools, car accessories, bicycles, and pots and pans. Most of the products are gaudy and low tech. They say that 1,700,000 different things are on show. Effectively this mind-boggling place is the shop window for the great Chinese industrial revolution, the extraordinary rush to turn the country into the global manufacturing powerhouse that has transformed China's cities over the past 30 years. It's one of those statistics which nobody can prove, but they say that more than half of all the world's Christmas decorations are made in China. A huge proportion of them are on sale to global buyers in the endless booths of the Yiwu wholesale market.

Chicken Feathers

But why did Yiwu become the centre of China's Christmas goods industry? As in other Chinese cities, capitalism seems to have broken out in Yiwu as an ingenious response to abject poverty.

The santas come in all different shapes, sizes - and colours

They tell you that farming was always dirt poor here. For hundreds of years, ambitious locals seeking another income equipped themselves with trays of small household items to peddle round surrounding small towns and villages. These were the so-called stick men, who still exist across China. Their sole asset (apart from physical strength) is a long pole, to which they attach two balancing loads at either end. They then balance the sticks on one shoulder, and walk to the load to where it is wanted - for a very small fee. Yiwu's stick men did not wait to be hired. Instead they bought goods, crammed them into bamboo trays, balanced them on their sticks, and walked out to sell them in the surrounding region, announcing their arrival in a village by twirling a toy drum on another, tiny, stick.

Yiwu's historic traders are celebrated in statues

It was very small scale. The itinerant traders of Yiwu would even accept chicken feathers in exchange for their goods, a commodity many farmers produced. The feathers were light to transport, of course. And they were valuable to make feather dusters with, or sold for use as fertiliser dug into the soil on other people's land. The chicken feather traders became famous, a symbol of the enterprise of the area. In Yiwu there are life-sized statues of them. Restaurants have replicas of their trays on show as a talking point. From 1949, under Communism, even this minor private enterprise was frowned upon. But it broke cover again at the end of the 1970s, inspired by the sweeping economic reforms ushered in by President Deng Xiaoping, under the banner "To Be Rich is Glorious". In 1982, traders opened market stalls in the open air. And buyers began to flock to the city, for the sheer convenience of being able to sample the fruits of the Chinese industrial revolution, put in an order and wait for their goods to be shipped all over the world. It was a year-round trade fair, and what it showcased was the labour-intensive, low-cost products that any developing country starts by making in hundreds, and then thousands.

Supply chain

So 33 years after the Yiwu wholesale market started, what does it tell us about the state of the Chinese economy whose hell-for-leather growth it represents? The official figures show that China's growth rate is slowing down, and the wholesale market traders admit that times are harder than they used to be.

The market has now turned its attention to Christmas 2016

Overseas buyers say that after many years when Chinese prices stayed the same, they're now on the rise. Not by huge leaps, but yearly increases of 3% or so are more than foreign customers are used to. The price rises are not just a response to market forces. They reflect the official Five Year Plan policy to allow the workers who've powered the new China to share in the gains... at least a little bit.

Non-Christmas goods are also on sale

But for China's customers, rising prices pose a problem. Some buyers are talking of looking to other developing countries for the goods they need - India perhaps, or Indonesia. But in Yiwu there are trusted local agents who for as modest fee can supervise overseas orders and get them on the ships, even when the buyers have long gone home. And the Chinese supply chain is now well-established, from factory, to packing supplier, to dock, to a long container ship voyage, and then through local customs on to the domestic warehouse. This season's 2015 orders started arriving in Britain in August. Overseas buyers in Yiwu a month or two ago had Christmas 2016 on their minds. Next year's novelties will feature LED-illuminated liquid filled displays. Very cheap voice-controlled toys are on the way, too.

Some manufacturing work can also be witnessed at the market

You would think you would get a vivid picture of the violent variations of world trade from a day mingling with the merchants in Yiwu Wholesale Market. But if the salespeople know what's going on, they are not giving much away. Perhaps the sheer momentum of the Chinese manufacturing machine swamps all other considerations. In the wholesale market booths where the finished trees, and so many other things, are on offer to global buyers, there is little gossip about industry trends or supply and demand. The salespeople sit there, waiting for orders. The factories make it, and at Yiwu they wait for the orders to come in. It's worked for more than 30 years of ever-increasing activity. What could possibly go wrong now? How many plastic singing Santa Clauses does the world need? One day in Yiwu they will probably find out.

Culled from www.bbc.com