Christmas Every Day

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not; for behold I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapping in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” (Luke 8-14.)

The confrontation between the angelic host and the shepherds of Bethlehem has not been as popular a topic in Christian art as the Adoration of the Shepherds. In the fifteenth-century breviary of Martin of Tours we see a shepherd marching toward the Nativity as a bold bagpiper but in the image above, Leon François Comerre’s 1875 L’Annonce aux bergers, the emphasis is on the stark dread of the shepherds as they are dazzled by the sudden appearance of the luminous angel.

The annunciation to the shepherds is retold in carols such as “Shepherd, Shake Off Your Drowsy Sleep”, “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night”, and “Campana Sobre Campana”, and in medieval drama where it is the occasion for a good deal of mirth and low humour — a tradition which continues to the present day in Los Pastores. The above passage from Luke is recited by Linus in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

In 1557 Thomas Tusser published a book on rural customs and agricultural practices in Tudor England, entitled A Hundredth Good Pointes of Husbandrie. In 1573 he expanded the work into Five Hundred Good Pointes of Husbandrie; the book was reprinted many times for over a century. Among his poetical observations were a number of verses on Christmas. Here are a few, showing the attitude of English country folk toward the holiday.

A description of the feast of the birth of Christ, commonly called Christmas.

Of Christ cometh Christmas, the name with the feast,
a time full of joie to the greatest and least :
At Christmas was Christ (our Saviour) borne,
the world through sinne altogether forlorne.

At Christmas the daies doo begin to take length,
of Christ doth religion cheefly take strength.
As Christmas is onely a figure or trope,
so onely in Christ is the strength of our hope.

At Christmas we banquet, the rich with the poore,
who then (but the miser) but openeth his doore –
At Christmas of Christ many Carols we sing,
and give many gifts in the joy of that King.

At Christmas in Christ we reioice and be glad,
as onely of whom our comfort is had ;
At Christmas we joy altogether with mirth,
for his sake that joyed us all with his birth

Despite the fact that Christmas in Australia is celebrated in the midst of summer, folks Down Under love the holiday and have added a number of lovely carols to the canon. In this song by John Wheeler and Billy James, which was first published in 1948, the setting is the lonely outback.

The Three Drovers

Across the plains one Christmas night
Three drovers riding blithe and gay,
Looked up and saw a starry light
More radiant than the Milky Way;
And on their hearts such wonder fell,
They sang with joy ‘Noel!,
Noel! Noel! Noel! Noel!’

The air was dry with summer heat,
And smoke was on the yellow moon;
But from the heavens, faint and sweet,
Came floating down a wond’rous tune;
And as they heard, they sang full well
Those drovers three — ‘Noel! Noel!’

The black swans flew across the sky,
The wild dog called across the plain,
The starry lustre blazed on high,
Still echoed on the heavenly strain;
And still they sang, ‘Noel! Noel!’T
hose drovers three. Noel! Noel!

An old custom in Newfoundland was to celebrate the successful lifting of the Christmas pudding from the pot with gunfire. One account of a surprised observer reads:

On Christmas Day I was astonished to hear so many gun shots and ran quickly about to see what was wrong. There they have a fashion of blowin’ the Christmas puddin’ out of the pot. As the wife or woman of the house is lifting the pudding from the pot, the husband or man of the house is standing outside the back door with the gun. As soon as the pudding rises out, the shot is fired into the air.

A popular English Christmas game in which a blind-folded player must catch someone and indentify him or her. The fun lies in coming tantalizingly close to the player without getting caught. In A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens the guests of Scrooge’s nephew Fred play the game in such a way as to further the possibilities of romance:

There was first a game at blind-man’s buff. Of course there was. And I no more believe Topper was really blind than I believe he had eyes in his boots. My opinion is, that it was a done thing between him and Scrooge’s nephew; and that the Ghost of Christmas Present knew it. The way he went after that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage on the credulity of human nature. Knocking down the fire-irons, tumbling over the chairs, bumping against the piano, smothering himself among the curtains, wherever she went, there went he. He always knew where the plump sister was. He wouldn’t catch anybody else. If you had fallen up against him (as some of them did), on purpose, he would have made a feint of endeavouring to seize you, which would have been an affront to your understanding, and would instantly have sidled off in the direction of the plump sister. She often cried out that it wasn’t fair; and it really was not. But when at last, he caught her; when, in spite of all her silken rustlings, and her rapid flutterings past him, he got her into a corner whence there was no escape; then his conduct was the most execrable. For his pretending not to know her; his pretending that it was necessary to touch her head-dress, and further to assure himself of her identity by pressing a certain ring upon her finger, and a certain chain about her neck; was vile, monstrous. No doubt she told him her opinion of it, when, another blind-man being in office, they were so very confidential together, behind the curtains.

An eighteenth-century comment on a darker side of the game reveals: “Then it is lawful to set any thing in the way for Folks to tumble over, whether it be to break Arms, Legs, or Heads, ’tis no matter, for Neck‑or nothing, the Devil loves no Cripples.—This Play, I am told, was first set on foot by the Country Bone‑setters.”

A less boiterous variation was called Shadow-Buff. A “blind man” would sit on one side of a white sheet or tablecloth with a bright light shining on the other side. He would attempt to guess the identity of other players as they walked past the sheet casting shadows

A popular motif in medieval art, particularly in stained glass, was the depiction of the earthly ancestry of Jesus as a tree growing from Jesse, the father of David. A spectacular example of this is the twelfth-century Jesse Tree window from the Benedictine abbey of St Denis in France. In the twentieth century the notion of a Jesse tree as a symbol of Advent attracted a number of American artists and craftspeople. Many churches and homes now contain a tree, tree branch or banner decorated with Bible verses prophesying the coming of Jesus or ornaments symbolic of Messianic prophecies.

Sometimes the Jesse Tree is decorated piece by piece in the fashion of an Advent calendar and in some churches a Jesse tree is used to collect winter clothing for the poor with members attaching hats, scarves or mittens.

James VI and I,(1566-1625) King of Scotland (1567-1625) and England (1603-25), was a staunch defender of Christmas.

Raised in Scotland where the Calvinist church had forbidden Christmas celebrations, it was feared that he would be an opponent of the feast when he travelled south to assume the throne of England in 1603. Instead, James proved to be a stout advocate of Christmas customs, commissioning lavish holiday entertainments for his court from Richard Middleton and Ben Jonson (including Christmas His Masque).

He ordered the English nobility to leave London in December for their country estates so that they could keep Christmas and its traditional hospitality to their tenants as in days of old. In the Puritan opposition to Christmas and to religious ceremonial in general, King James peceived a kind of sedition and opposition to royal authority. He defended “the freedom to be merry”, commanding dour Scotland in the Five Articles of Perth to keep Christmas in the English manner and issuing the Book of Sports which prescribed the activities that could lawfully be enjoyed after church on Sundays.

In mid-nineteenth-century America, the elfin gift-bringer had more than one name depending on his locale. In New York he was Santa Claus or St Nicholas; in Philadelphia he was Kriss Kringle or Belsnickel. At one time, as we have seen these names meant very different characters, Kriss Kringle was an American corruption of das Christkindl, the Christchild, portrayed either as an infant or as a white-clad adolescent; Belsnickel was a shaggy and fearsome creature, often accompanying St Nicholas or the Christchild. By the 1840s, however, the allure of Santa Claus was such that though Pennsylvanians clung to the familiar names, the gift-bringer they were attached to was that described by Clark Clement Moore in “ ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas”. We can see this in works published in Philadelphia such as Kriss Kringle’s Book and Kriss Kringle’s Christmas Tree where the generous elf in question is clearly the newly minted Santa Claus and no Germanic import. In an 1855 article in Putnam’s Monthly, the narrator, Mr. Sparrowgrass implores his wife to mind her language:

“My dear,” said I after a pause, “speaking of children I wish you would not teach the young ones so many of your Philadelphia phrases….Mrs. Sparrowgrass, next Christmas Santa Claus, if you please – no, Kriss Kringle. Santa Claus is the patron saint, Mrs. Sparrowgrass, of the New Netherlands, and the ancient Dorp of Yonkers; he it is who fills the fireside stockings; he only can come down Westchester chimneys, and I would much prefer not to have the children’s minds and the flue occupied with his Pennsylvania prototype.”

A large fortress-like church complex on Manger Square in Bethlehem is centred on the site where Jesus was said to have been born. The picture above was taken in 1944 by my father when he was stationed in Palestine with the RAF.

As early as the second century local tradition claimed that the Nativity of Christ had taken place in a stable-cave, the location of which was sufficiently well-known that the Roman emperor Hadrian established a pagan grove there dedicated to Adonis in order to discourage Christian worship on the site. In the third century Origen and other visitors were still being directed to the spot. The theologian reported: “In Bethlehem the cave is pointed out where He was born, and the manger in the cave where He was wrapped in swaddling clothes, and the rumor is in those places and among foreigners of the Faith that indeed Jesus was born in this cave.”

The first Church of the Nativity was built over the cave by Saint Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, Rome’s first Christian ruler. This church was later damaged in an uprising and was rebuilt in the sixth century at the command of the Byzantine emperor Justinian. When the area was overrun by Persian invaders in 614, legend claims that the Church of the Nativity was spared because of depictions in a mosaic of Magi in Persian dress.

 The cross-shaped Church of St Mary of the Nativity, 170 feet long and 80 feet wide, stands above the small grotto where a silver star marks the spot where Jesus was born; the inscription reads Hic De Virgine Maria Jesus Christus Natus Est — “Here Jesus Christ was Born of the Virgin Mary.” Nearby is a chapel where the manger stood in which the infant was placed. Surrounding the Church of the Nativity are other chapels and convents of the Catholic, Orthodox and Armenian churches; these three denominations share the administration of various parts of the complex. Quarrels between them in the nineteenth century took on dangerous overtones. The Russian goverment supported the Orthodox claims while the Catholics were backed by the French government; these hard feelings were one of the reasons for the outbreak of the Crimean War in the 1850s.