Tis the season to be jolly!.

Troll a lol a lol, a troll is a troll. Welcome to the "who the fuck muted who" prize giving. Yes it is the season to be merry and giving, so with the latter in mind I am going to be "giving" 25 steem away to the winner of this contest, on the day this post ends.

How do I enter this I hear you cry!!!!!! This is possibly my simplest giveaway ever, and if you are not in the lead yet, I will give hints and tips how to win.

To enter you must comply, only joking, that never got society anywhere did it, complying that is.

You simply have to go here http://steemit.serviceuptime.net/mute.php and see how many people muted you!...

simply input your own name, and click, the person with the most amount of mutes by the time this post finishes wins, it is that simple!

This has potential! If someone comments that they have been muted by 20 people, and you too are on 20, all you have to do is go and talk to a "easily offended" steemian, and bingo, you will be on 21, just use logic and reason and I feel sure you may get a positive result.

After the silencing of the poor people with HF20 it would suggest steemit does in fact have a large percentage of said "easily offended" so finding one will be easier than you might think!.....

When we going after the middle class @ned, they have way tooooo much of a voice on here dammit!

Obligatory xmas carol.

Merry Christmas.

Pagan Roots? 5 Surprising Facts About Christmas.

When you gather around the Christmas tree or stuff goodies into a stocking, you're taking part in traditions that stretch back thousands of years — long before Christianity entered the mix.

Pagan, or non-Christian, traditions show up in this beloved winter holiday, a consequence of early church leaders melding Jesus' nativity celebration with pre-existing midwinter festivals. Since then, Christmas traditions have warped over time, arriving at their current state a little more than a century ago.

Read on for some of the surprising origins of Christmas cheer, and find out why Christmas was once banned in New England.

1. Early Christians had a soft spot for pagans

It's a mistake to say that our modern Christmas traditions come directly from pre-Christian paganism, said Ronald Hutton, a historian at Bristol University in the United Kingdom. However, he said, you'd be equally wrong to believe that Christmas is a modern phenomenon. As Christians spread their religion into Europe in the first centuries A.D., they ran into people living by a variety of local and regional religious creeds.

Christian missionaries lumped all of these people together under the umbrella term "pagan," said Philip Shaw, who researches early Germanic languages and Old English at Leicester University in the U.K. The term is related to the Latin word meaning "field," Shaw told LiveScience. The lingual link makes sense, he said, because early European Christianity was an urban phenomenon, while paganism persisted longer in rustic areas.

Early Christians wanted to convert pagans, Shaw said, but they were also fascinated by their traditions.

"Christians of that period are quite interested in paganism," he said. "It's obviously something they think is a bad thing, but it's also something they think is worth remembering. It's what their ancestors did." [In Photos: Early Christian Rome]

Perhaps that's why pagan traditions remained even as Christianity took hold. The Christmas tree is a 17th-century German invention, University of Bristol's Hutton told LiveScience, but it clearly derives from the pagan practice of bringing greenery indoors to decorate in midwinter. The modern Santa Claus is a direct descendent of England's Father Christmas, who was not originally a gift-giver. However, Father Christmas and his other European variations are modern incarnations of old pagan ideas about spirits who traveled the sky in midwinter, Hutton said.

Full source.

Entries below in the comments with your total, or wait until day 7 if you think you can do better. :-)

@shepz1 wishes you a superb day or night ahead.

I still have no idea where the gif came from.