They are planted in graveyards in the UK, it prevents grazing animals from entering and soiling up the place. The animals seem to know to keep away. They cant nibble the grass without getting a mouthful of the needles.
Pre-Christian religions had many associations with yew trees (they live for a long time, give off mildly hallucinogenic gasses on hot days, discourage animals), and so built their holy sites around them. When Christianity came to Britain, churches were deliberately built on pagan holy sites to overrun the old religions, in the same way that early Christianity took over roman holy days (Saturnalia -> Christmas, Lemuria -> All Saint's Day). This led to churches being built next to sites with copious yew trees.
Look at your source — hardly authoritative! And the so-called evidence... Thin, entirely circumstantial, and in places actually wrong.
For example, Saturnalia went — at its longest - until the 23rd, not the 25th. Moreover, Christians likely got the 25th date based on religious calculation[1], not with reference to the one of the ancient festivals Victorian "historians" liked to speculate about.
The article attempts to link gifting verses to writing Christmas cards — a Christmas tradition not popularised until the 19th C and no older than the 17th.
Feasting and exchanging of gifts, much less the greeting "lo saturnalia" — literally the only other "evidence" presented here — need hardly be addressed, given how ubiquitous such things are with regard to festival, and how thin the apparent connection.
There is no positive evidence for this link, hence it not being taken seriously by any modern historian. It is no more than outdated speculation.
[1] https://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?id=3007366&url=art...
Still better than the source you originally gave, which was non-existent, or the one you've given now, which is Catholic propaganda.
It might be true that Christmas was not a direct rip-off of Saturnalia per se (though we will probably never know for sure because the Church surely did not go out of its way to record this) but there can be no doubt that both Christmas and Saturnalia are solstice festivals, so at the very least they share a common motivational root. The exact provenance of the details doesn't really matter. What matters is that Jesus was almost certainly not born on December 25, and so whatever the motivation for that date was, Jesus's birth wasn't it.
Untruthful! My nephew Algernon! Impossible! He is an Oxonian!Millenia of selective breeding to try for the healthiest strongest animals we can, and they're still shit.
They'll get ill if they breathe wrong. They'll get ill if they eat a mouthful too much or too little of grass that's ever so slightly too green. They'll get ill if it's too rainy or not rainy enough.
How the hell did they even evolve?
I'm sure that if you investigate feral horse populations like North American mustangs or Australian brambies, you will find out that they don't "get ill if they breathe wrong". Because all that did, died without leaving any offspring long time ago.
Yeah. They had that in the wild too.
> you will find out that they don't "get ill if they breathe wrong"
They very much do. If anything they're worse than domesticated horses.