Father Christmas Buried In Essex, U.K.

According to The Daily Mail and express.co.uk, someone called Father Christmas was laid to rest in a churchyard in the village of Dedham, Essex, on May 30, 1564.

An entry in the parish record for that month, reads: “The 30th Day, Father Christmas was buried.”

A spokesperson for Essex Records Office confirmed it was no joke and that careful research had uncovered a whole host of Christmas family members living in Essex.

Christmas was not an uncommon surname in the area around that time, according to the spokesperson.

“It appears with some frequency in north Essex and south Suffolk and by 1881 the name was still largely concentrated in the south east of England,” he said.

He also said, “The title ‘father’ is most likely the usage given in The Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a respectful title given to an old and venerable man.'”

Pennsylvania Man Axes Wife To Death On Christmas Eve

In Pennsylvania, a 36-year-old man admitted to axing his wife to death before taking the couple’s two children to his parent’s house and calling the police to confess his crime.

Dustin Lee Klopp admitted to killing wife Stephanie Kilhefner with an ax at their Paradise Township home in Pennsylvania at about 10 p.m. Wednesday, according to a statement from Pennsylvania State Police in Lancaster.

In an attempt to cover his crime, Klopp tried to clean up the blood and moved his wife’s body to a garden shed at the property.

Having called the police at around 5:20 p.m. on Christmas Day, Klopp reportedly turned himself in at around 6:30 p.m. The police stated that he gave a detailed account of the incident during questioning.

When a state trooper arrived at the property at 623 Georgetown Road, where the murder took place, they found Kilhefner’s body in a carrier bag in the shed.

http://lancasteronline.com/news/local/paradise-township-man-charged-with-cutting-axing-wife-to-death/article_e5e1e4d2-8ca9-11e4-8fd0-f7625cc3354c.html

http://www.inquisitr.com/1707558/man-hacks-wife-to-death-with-axe-on-christmas-eve-during-heated-argument/#joPqIp2uRTl7Z2kE.99

Bad Weather Could Disrupt Holiday Travel

AP video.

Get Your Santa Photo With Guns At Atlanta Gun Club

“Santa’s Grotto” gun club in Atlanta, Georgia, is allowing citizens to meet Santa Claus and pose with him while holding automatic weapons including an AK-47, an AR-15 and an FN-SCAR-17. The charity event was on Saturday the day before the second anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting.

Video by The Lip TV.

German Consumer Confidence Highest In Eight Years

Consumers in Germany are putting the country’s economic troubles behind them and looking to the new year with renewed optimism.

Consumer confidence in Europe’s largest economy improved this month, having stabilized in November after several months of decline, according to GfK. In fact, German consumer sentiment hit its highest level in eight years as shoppers felt more upbeat about Europe’s largest economy going into 2015.

Market research group GfK said its forward-looking consumer sentiment indicator rose to 9.0 going into January from 8.7 in December, the highest reading since December 2006.

“Consumers apparently now assume that the period of economic weakness in Germany will pass and the domestic economy will return to growth in the coming months,” GfK said in a statement.

The reading is based on a survey of around 2,000 Germans, who give their expectations about pay and the economy in the coming months, as well as their willingness to spend money.

However, the research group warned that concerns about instability in Ukraine, Syria and Iraq and the Ebola outbreak continued to drag on the economy.

Pastor Steven Anderson

Baptist pastor Steven Anderson in Tempe, Arizona called for the mass extermination of LGBT people on Sunday in a sermon entitled “AIDS: The Judgement of God.”

In the sermon, which was uploaded to YouTube on Monday from Faithful Word Baptist Church, Pastor Anderson said that God stated in the scriptures that gays should be killed, and humanity could have an “AIDS-free world by Christmas” if that is what’s done.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/03/arizona-pastor-steven-anderson-gay-men-_n_6263720.html