Christmas Every Day

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”

I know many Americans think of Christmas as a single day and like to clear away the trappings of the season well before the fifth of January, but that is sheer barbarism, if you ask me, morally only a few steps removed from human sacrifice, cannibalism, or golf.

(from “The Dream-Child’s Progress and Other Essays” by David Bentley Hart)

A box or trough in which food for livestock is placed. Luke’s gospel relates how when Jesus was born in a stable his mother laid him in a manger; pious legend has it that the animals of the stable warmed him and watched over him there. Representations of the manger can be seen in the near-universal crèche, in artwork depicting the Nativity as well as in the lattice-work crust of the Christmas mince pie and the straw placed under the tablecloth in eastern European homes. Carols celebrating the scene include “Away in a Manger”, “O Holy Night” and “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day”.

The church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome claims to possess pieces of the original Bethlehem crib, seen above — five wooden slats of sycamore brought from the Holy Land in the seventh century which are exposed on the high altar every Christmas Eve. These are believed to have formed part of an x-shaped support for the manger itself which was probably made of the same limestone that formed the cave where Jesus was born. In the sixteenth century Frederick the Wise of Saxony, Martin Luther’s patron, also had portions of the manger among his vast collection of relics but the fate of these pieces is unknown.

When legal threats by the Freedom From Religion Foundation forced the Minnesota town of Wadena to take down its traditional nativity scene in 2015, disappointed citizens responded by turning the township into an orgy of crèches. A local movement sprang up to replace the single banned nativity scene with hundreds of them in businesses, offices and private yards. The mayor, who had reluctantly yielded to the FFRF demand, put up eight displays in front of his own house