"Kalo dio!" Thousands of years ago, the Talmudic Sages thought about January 1

"Kalo dio!" Thousands of years ago, the Talmudic Sages thought about January 1

The Sages of the Talmud had nothing to say about Christmas, but they were familiar with the Roman festival of the "Kalends", celebrated on January 1 during ancient times. As Prof. Eliezer Segal showed in The Jewish Star at the beginning of this decade, one of the ways in which the Sages attempted to understand the origin and purpose of the day was to suggest that it was a pagan corruption of biblical traditions. The "Kalends", Segal notes, a mentioned in Mishnah Avodah …