Aristocrats Who Lost All Their Money Shutterstock
By Becki Robins/Jan. 15, 2021 1:09 am EDT
Aristocrats are kind of known for being quirky. At various points throughout history, they ve been portrayed as glamorous, ridiculous, snobbish, excessive, and about a million other adjectives. But they were almost universally not known for one particular thing, and that s being frugal. Nope, if you were born into the upper class you tended to like to flaunt your money with fancy parties and velvet robes and expensive horses. Now, some aristocrats were smarter about their cash than others, and these folks were able to juggle the complexities of flaunting their wealth with, you know, actually hanging onto most of it at least until the day after they died from gluttony or suffocating under a 30-foot-high pile of paper money or something.
Werewolves, magic cats and sex jokes: was this wild Christmas tale the first English novel?
Forget Scrooge and his gloomy ghosts – William Baldwin s 16th-century story is a hallucinatory mix of comedy, horror and religious fable
24 December 2020 • 6:00am
A lively cat in Il Sodoma s fresco cycle on the Life of St Benedict at Monte Oliveto Maggiore (1497-8)
Credit: De Agostini
Christmas is the perfect time to curl up with an old book – the older the better – so why settle for Dickens? Having weathered a mere 177 Yules, A Christmas Carol is a mewling kitten compared to William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, which this year marks its 450th anniversary.
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Before the pandemic, throngs of people in the Bay Area would gather to commemorate the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Roman Catholic holiday with Mexican indigenous roots.
The feast, observed on Dec. 12, typically draws thousands of faithful each year to parishes such as St. Elizabeth’s in Oakland, in celebrations that last day and night with banda and mariachi music, and lots of food.
But with COVID-19 cases surging, the festivities this weekend will be markedly different. If anyone has COVID-19, stay home. We have to take care of each other so we can care for others.