Christmas Every Day

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The Stalin regime wished to abolish Christmas and to shift festivities to a secular New Year celebration. Here is a seasonal greeting featuring partisans blowing up a German troop truck. It reads “Happy New Year”.

Here is another SS Christmas oddity: a picture of a clay candle-holder, a Jullichte. The original was found in an archaeological dig and was supposed to represent the pagan Teutonic past before the Christian conversion of Germany. Replicas were given out as gifts and features in Nazi bonfire lighting ceremonies.

Hitler’s SS was generally hostile to Christmas as a Christian festival. They preferred to honour the pagan Winter Solstice and to term the season “Julfest” rather that “Weihnacht”.

It’s from from the German “putzen”, to decorate; it refers to the Moravian crèche scene, a central part of the Christmas season to those religious immigrants who were so influential in the shaping of the holiday in the United States. Like the Latin American and Italian Nativity scenes they can be quite ornate, often occupying a whole room and taking weeks to build; most however are small enough to place under a single Christmas tree. They can portray not only the Holy Family in the stable at Bethlehem but also a whole landscaped area with fences, buildings, foliage and tiny characters.

  A similar custom of an under-the-tree crèche is found in northwestern Nova Scotia, Canada where folk artists were famous for the miniature towns, farms and churches that once were placed at the base of the Christmas tree.

“In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it “Christmas” and went to church; the Jews called it “Hanukka” and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say “Merry Christmas!” or “Happy Hanukka!” or (to the atheists) “Look out for the wall!” 

Dave Barry

“Or consider Christmas  — could Satan in his most malignant mood have devised a worse combination of graft plus buncombe than the system whereby several hundred million people get a billion or so gifts for which they have no use, and some thousands of shop-clerks die of exhaustion while selling them and every other child in the western world is made ill from over-eating — all in the name of the lowly Jesus?”

Upton Sinclair

“It is Christmas every time you let God love others through you … yes, it is Christmas every time you smile at your brother and offer him your hand.”

Mother Teresa of Calcutta

A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.  G. K. Chesterton – “Christmas”