Yuletide Trimmings

(Thought-Random)

        Christmas today is a time of goodwill and feasting.  It is a joyous medley of festive songs and fragrant evergreens, of pealing bells and lilting carols.  It is a time of dimly-lit Christmas cribs and brightly-lit Christmas trees.  There is a curious mixture of religious services, of evergreen wreaths of holly and mistletoe, of puddings and cakes, and tinkling music boxes and bells.  But it was not always so.

        History tells us that Christmas was not celebrated until nearly 400 years after the angel of the Lord had sent the shepherds of Bethlehem to look for the Infant Lord in a manger.  Even then, it was not called 'Christmas'  because that name came about 800 years later in England where the celebration of the midnight Mass on the eve of the Nativity was permitted and was called 'Christ's Mass', later shortened to 'Christmas'.

        Christmas was at first a purely religious feast, but as more and more pagans left their false gods to follow the one, true God, the feast acquired secular characteristics.  The pagans discarded their gods without much struggle, but the old revelries and feasting which they had associated December 25 with were hard to forget.  The Church allowed certain harmless pagan customs to continue and now these customs have been so much imbued into our Christmases that even we cannot celebrate Christmas without them.

        Giving little candles and clay dolls for gifts was an old Roman custom.  The Northern barbarians are credited with the gift-giving custom.  The artificially-decorated Christmas tree seems to have been used first in Germany.  This became a 'must' in England when Queen Victoria of German descent had one set up in Windsor Castle.  From the Goths, we inherited the Yule log celebrations.  St. Francis of Assisi gave us the 'Belen' or Christmas Crib in 1223 and his followers, the Christmas Carol.

        Bells are another feature of Christmas today.  They peal from church steeples and mingle with the Adestes floating from church choirs.  They ring to announce a Christmas that has traveled long and far from Bethlehem to the four corners of the earth,  from generation to generation,  gathering more joys as it came.  Tidings of great joy that shall be to all people, announced by the angel that night in Bethlehem,  are retold and now, almost 2000 years later, the birth of Christ is once again celebrated with the joyous jubilation and reverence of all peoples hovering like incense around the incorruptible holiness of Bethlehem.