It's funny how times change and yet in many ways events stay very much the same. Doesn't the saying go "The more things change the more they stay the same?"
This morning was particularly crisp and icy and as the sprogs gathered their belongings and the house was preparing for the working day I took a few minutes to throw out small scraps of bread to the birds as the ground seemed frozen.
Left: A stain-glass window. The scene is adapted from "The Nativity," a religious painting by German artist Bernhard Plockhorst. He was born in Brunswick in 1825, studied in Munich and Paris, became a professor at the Weimar Art School, and devoted a large part of his life to portrait work in connection with religious art.
Plockhorst incorporated a tiny "Christmas rose" in the lower left corner of the window. It is based on the legend that the little sister of the boy holding the lamb was crying because she had no gift for the Christ child. An angel appeared to her, and upon learning of her sorrow, extended its arm and immediately wild pink roses sprang up all over the hills of Palestine. The little girl picked the flowers and presented them to baby Jesus.
The botanical name of the flower is Black Hellebore, and to this day they bloom only during the Christmas season.
With the icy white ground and the bushes and trees nearby and far giving off a silvery sheen, I was momentarily transported back to times gone by. To the Victorian era with its re-invention of Christmas whilst many lived in slum conditions; to the era of the Commonwealth with Christmas banned by the puritans as they traversed the land smashing statues of the Saints and ripping out beautiful fittings from churches (like 1960s trendies before their time); to the medieval period when "Merrie England" knew how to celebrate the 12 days of Christmas with great pomp yet simple faith (long before Cohens... sorry, Tescos decided Christmas profiteering should start at the end of October).In the semi-darkness, still and quiet of an (almost!) Winter morning, I thought of the history and changes...
Inside the house one of the sprogs was gathering old Christmas decorations to take into school to help brighten up the classroom a little, and as I saw the old tinsel it reminded me of my own childhood, when we'd take yard after yard (NB: Not metre after metre) of tinsel down from the attic (blowing off the accumulated dust) and festoon the tree, each room, the hallway, the banisters and anywhere else within reach of human hands with this silver, red, green, blue and any-other-colour-under-the-sun festive hanging decorations that some might have considered gaudy, but in our rush to make the house look as 'Christmassy' as possible we ensured no surface was left un-festooned.
I'm sure even the cat would have been decorated had she sat still (in fact I think sometimes she was, even though she ran for it!).
And so I return to today. A world full of cynicism. A world with more than its fair share of shysters. A world in which the daily struggle to pay the bills is only outdone in degrees of importance by the lifelong struggle to do what's right for 'Faith, Family, Nation.'
Was it so very different in the past?
I'm sure the slum-dwellers felt these pressures just as keenly, if not moreso. My grandparents grew up in an area that was later part of the slum clearances of the 50s and 60s and things were pretty tight (I won't let on about one uncle who marked his bottle of lemonade to stop the siblings sneaking some, only for them to top it up with water), but did Christmas mean more to that immediate family numbering in double figures crammed into its two-up, two-down mean more and have more resonance?
Whilst our struggle is (or should be) all about providing for our people and (re) creating a society that views our folk as made in the image of God, and not (laboratory) made to be as cogs in a machine for profiteers and banksters to use to maximise profits; sometimes I do wonder if all the consumables, all the consumerism and the shop-till-you-drop culture is making us soft, and obscuring our view of what Christmas is all about.
Right: If this man (or one like him!) leaves you a sack full of money please be careful. He is not Santa, Father Christmas, St. Nicholas or similar. His tribe do not celebrate the birth of Christ and this latter-day Herod will only cause you grief. Mark the sack "return to sender" and leave outside the nearest Israeli consulate.
I mentioned earlier that the Victorians had recreated (albeit with their own slant) an earlier memory of Christmas enjoyed in pre-Reformation Merrie England, before the hard-nosed abstentionist Puritans banned Christmas.
Yet what the Puritans tried to do by forcing Christmas underground and denying the English their desire to truly celebrate the birth of Christ, the Capitalists have in turn (in typically perverse manner) almost achieved.
As so many kids (from pre-teen onwards) now argue over whose had the most expensive gifts and spend Christmas Day playing Grand Theft Auto (with its gratuitous language and sexual aspect) we have to wonder if this is what it's all about.
I think it's time to reclaim Christmas.
Yes we must "eat, drink and be merry." The Welsh call the season of Advent "Winter Lent" because in centuries past they would prepare for Christmas as they prepared for the more important festival of Easter - by fasting, prayer, penance and alms-giving.
So the idea of feasting at Christmas is something that harks back to our forefathers who knew how to enjoy themselves, as the reverse side of the coin to the preparations they made for Christmas.
We must also take Christmas back from the Cohens (sorry... Tescos), those profiteers who just view us as cattle to buy their cheap shoddy crap and who fill up our larders and freezers with their mass-produced chemically enhanced "food."
We should also take back Christmas from the Communists and Liberals. These are people (headed by a - 13th? - tribe) who hate Christianity and all it entails. As part of a 2000 year old war, they want to eradicate Christmas, and they often use the excuse of "multi-cult" and "multi-faith Britain" to get rid of Christmas.
If some minorities do not like it then they can leave a country that has been Christian for most of the last 2000 years, though in fact most of minorities do not even mind Christmas - it tends only to be the hardline Communists and Liberals who use them as an excuse, and most of those are either Jewish or nominal Christians.
So as our people scrabble to retain any identity in the tidal wave of mass immigration and the attacks of anti-Christian forces seeking to undermine our history, our faith and the family (I think primarily of Reds, Homosexuals, Zionists and some CIA-backed Muslims) let us learn to celebrate Christmas properly!
Left: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a typically Talmudic/Communist atheist set-up. Like the Red councils and pressure groups over here, the ACLU tries to wipe out all connection to Christianity (even a watered down version), in favour of "inclusive" events for Jews, Sikhs, Muslims, Homosexuals, Atheists and more. This breed of people won't be happy until Christianity is expunged and replaced with their own Communist creed of the "brotherhood of man" which in reality leads to the "brotherhood of the gulag."
We as a family do try and celebrate Christmas properly, and I can tell you this: if done correctly, traditionally and in the right spirit the children enjoy the festive season even more. Yes they still can't wait to see what Santa's brought them... but it isn't the be-all and end-all for them, and it certainly makes Christmas and the importance of Christmas last for much longer than a few hours early (too early...!) on Christmas morning.
Standing in the frosty silence this morning I could feel the folk-memory of my forefathers, those who had struggled and fought to ensure future generations lived, those who had known how to celebrate Christmas and without the "benefits" of consumerism or atheist (local) government knew what the season of Advent was all about.
It stirred the soul.
P.S. In light of the above, if anyone dares to say "Happy Holidays" to you, you have my full permission to punch them in the nose whilst stating "it is Merry Christmas you dimwit."
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