Tag: Christmas

HAPPY CHRISTMAS

Published on by smitch45171 Comment

Image result for poinsettia

Happy Christmas to readers of Canonfodder and thank you for your comments, “likes” and encouragement and to those who have shared the blogs.

As a retired vicar I miss the Christmas Day services when reunited families with visiting grandparents and children home from college would show off, with some embarrassment new scarves, socks and cuddly animals.

One of my favourite traditional Christmas legends is that of the poinsettia brought back from Southern Mexico by Joel Poinsett, the first US ambassador to that country in the nineteenth century. Poor Pepita is walking with her cousin Pedro to the Christmas Eve service with no gift to present at the crib. Picking some roadside flowers she makes a little bouquet and with some embarrassment lays them before the nativity scene in the village church. “The most humble of gifts given in love are acceptable” Pedro had said and suddenly the weeds are transformed into blooms of brilliant red.

The message is simple and needs no explanation; may love transform your Christmas.

NO ROOM AT THE INN

Published on by smitch45172 Comments

In hundreds of Christmas Nativity plays across the land innkeepers and innkeepers’ wives are turning away a dejected holy family with the familiar words “No room at the inn”.

Many of my readers will know as well as I do that in the gospels, in fact no such inhospitable publican exists. In the tale of the Good Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel, there is an inn and an innkeeper but when he tells the Christmas story he doesn’t use that word for inn. The word he uses means more simply room, guest room or place.

Mary and Joseph travel to their family home for the census and stay with relatives. As they are betrothed they are given the guest room – most houses had one. However when the baby is due, there isn’t enough space in the guest room for all the midwives and women to help with the birth, so they would have been moved into the larger downstairs family room. As in most dwellings at the time, this would be where the animals and the manger were kept.

All this, by the way, is not a modern discovery; it was known at the time of the Spanish Inquisition when one hapless Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas was brought before the Inquisitors for teaching it to his students!

Every year some newspaper columnist would tell us that the real Christmas story isn’t like it is in the nativity plays, and every year a well-meaning parishioner would draw my attention to such an article with indignation; do journalists think Christians to be naive and deluded? Do they think we don’t take our biblical studies seriously?

The reality is – in religious terms it’s all of little consequence.

We don’t live and die by the historical accuracy of the Christmas story but by the truths about human life written into it and by the spirit it imbues into our lives. Unless the telling of the Christmas story, the singing of the carols and the coming out in the dead of night for a midnight mass make some difference to our understanding of who we are, it counts for nothing.

If there is one thing that the Christmas story teaches us it’s that the things of God – love, life, happiness – come to us like tiny babies that have to be swaddled and cherished, nurtured and disciplined. Such is the way we should cherish every little bit of love and life and happiness that comes our way.