![\"Leighton's](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2015\/12\/225px-Frederic_Leighton_-_The_Star_of_Bethlehem.jpg\")
<\/a>Frederic Leighton, ca. 1862
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Lift up your head and be of good cheer; for behold, the time is at hand, and on this night shall the sign be given, and on the morrow come I into the world, to show unto the world that I will fulfil all that which I have caused to be spoken by the mouth of my holy prophets.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong>(3 Nephi 1:13)<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Sic et Non<\/em> is absolutely rolling in the Christmas spirit.\u00a0 It\u2019s difficult not<\/em> to be, dealing (as we are) with an energetic Spanish-speaking three-year-old visitor for whom absolutely everything<\/em> is new and exciting and \u2014 her current favorite word \u2014 a fiesta<\/em>!<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In that vein, I published this Deseret News<\/em> column some years ago with my late, lamented friend Bill Hamblin:<\/p>\n Owing to the huge immigration of villagers into rapidly growing cities caused by the Industrial Revolution, traditional observance of Christmas had been declining in England since the late 1700s.\u00a0 Leaving their ancestral customs and social networks behind, these new urban dwellers were often poor, and they worked long and exhausting hours in increasingly mechanized factories.\u00a0 Moreover, their employers\u2014of whom the fictional Ebenezer Scrooge is a fairly typical representative in this respect\u2014weren\u2019t especially inclined to grant them paid leave on Christmas Day.\u00a0 Time is money.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Writers such as Sir Walter Scott, in 1808, and the American Washington Irving, in 1820, lamented the decline of English country Christmases.\u00a0 But others welcomed it.\u00a0 Conservative reformed Protestants, for example, regarded Christmas as unbiblical, dangerously Catholic (\u201cChrist\u2019s mass\u201d), and even immoral.\u00a0 In fact, during the brief interval when they ruled England under Oliver Cromwell in the mid-1600s, they actually abolished it\u2014which isn\u2019t altogether surprising, given the drunkenness, hooliganism, extravagance, and sexual license that (rather like some Mardi Gras festivities today) often accompanied rural English celebrations of Christmas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n By the 1840s, however, many Englishmen were growing nostalgic for \u201cjolly olde England\u201d as it had existed before the arrival of the railroad and the dirty, noisy factories (William Blake\u2019s \u201cdark satanic mills\u201d) of rising industrial Britain.\u00a0 Charles Dickens, entering into middle age, was plainly among them.\u00a0 He wrote extensively and often about Christmas, far beyond the famous 1843 tale of Scrooge and those tutoring ghosts; his enormous audience demanded a Christmas article or story from him every year.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Dickens\u2019s descriptions of Christmas plainly rest upon idealized memories of his own childhood, which was, actually, partially spent in a workhouse while his father languished in Southwark\u2019s Marshalsea debtors\u2019 prison.\u00a0 (Many of his stories are, in part, autobiographical.) \u00a0A hearty meal of goose or turkey, hot wine or cider, games, dancing, sleighs, carriages, country inns, good cheer and gifts, a loving family gathered around a blazing Yule log while all is cold outside\u2014these are images of an essentially early Victorian rural Christmas that Dickens bequeathed to us and that still, for many, form the iconic visual image of the holiday.\u00a0 Even our common expectation that a proper Christmas greeting card depict snow may rest, to some extent, upon the fact that, rather unusually for his native climate, his first eight childhood Christmases were white.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Curiously, Christmas cards themselves seem to have their origin at about the same time, although they didn\u2019t really catch on and go into commercial production until about four decades later.\u00a0 The story is well documented:\u00a0 In 1843, Sir Henry Cole, too busy, he thought, to be able to write substantial Christmas letters to his friends, commissioned an artist to design decorated cards for him on which he would write brief notes.\u00a0 Sir Henry ordered a thousand of them\u2014as it happened, many more than he needed\u2014and sent the remainder to a stationer\u2019s shop on London\u2019s Old Bond Street for sale.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Perhaps strangely to us today, the celebrations in Dickens\u2019s \u201cChristmas Carol\u201d feature no Christmas trees.\u00a0 German-born Queen Charlotte introduced this new element of \u201ctraditional\u201d Christmas into the English royal household in 1800, but its popularity soared only after December 1840, when Queen Victoria\u2019s consort Prince Albert, also from Germany, set up and decorated several trees in the royal palace.\u00a0 (Victoria and Albert had been married the previous February.)\u00a0 \u201cThat pretty German toy,\u201d as Dickens would eventually call it, fit in very nicely with the holly and the mistletoe that had formed part of mid-winter celebrations in Britain since the fifth century.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n One of the author\u2019s sons later recalled that, for Dickens, Christmas was \u201ca great time, a really jovial time, and my father was always at his best, a splendid host, bright and jolly as a boy and throwing his heart and soul into everything that was going on. . . .\u00a0 And then the dance!\u00a0 There was no stopping him!\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s very largely thanks to Charles Dickens and his England that, despite the historical origins of Christmas\u2014probably in the spring and certainly in a Mediterranean climate\u2014modern Americans tend to celebrate Christ\u2019s Nativity as an idealized early Victorian mid-winter family feast. \u00a0But there\u2019s much good in the holiday customs he helped to preserve and spread, because, as Dickens himself wrote of the repentant Ebenezer Scrooge, \u201che knew how to keep Christmas well if any man alive possessed the knowledge.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n This is a column that I wrote for the Deseret News<\/em> in 2019:<\/p>\n Landing this month at the international airport in Cairo, Egypt\u2014busy gateway to a city and a nation that are roughly 85-90% Sunni Muslim\u2014you will see Christmas decorations everywhere.\u00a0 And such decorations show up prominently in hotels and public spaces well beyond the airport and the city.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n In Japan, where estimates put the number of Christians somewhere between one and two percent of the population or perhaps even lower, a quite secularized version of Christmas focused on Santa Claus and gift-giving is widely observed.\u00a0 Also prominent among Japanese Christmas traditions is eating fried chicken from KFC, where the statues of Colonel Sanders that stand in front of KFC restaurants are dressed as Santa Claus during the holiday season.\u00a0 Japanese people who don\u2019t pre-order their KFC Christmas dinners can end up waiting in long lines form them, and could miss out altogether.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cWhy KFC?\u201d you might ask.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n In 1970, just a few months after Takeshi Okawara opened the first KFC restaurant in Japan\u2014he would go on to become the CEO of Kentucky Fried Chicken Japan from 1984 to 2002\u2014he conceived the idea of a Christmas \u201cparty barrel\u201d containing not only chicken but, in some premium cases, ribs and stuffing and cake and even wine. \u00a0In 1974, the promotional campaign went national with the slogan \u201cKurisumasu ni wa Kentakkii\u201d (\u201cKentucky for Christmas\u201d).\u00a0 Since, in the 1970s, there were few if any traditional Japanese Christmas observances, KFC filled a void.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n In the West, too, Christmas remains by far the dominant holiday even among those indifferent to its theological background, including many non-Christians.\u00a0 In increasingly post-Christian Europe, for example, the colorful Christmas markets of such cities as Krakow, Dresden, Cordoba, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam continue to flourish.\u00a0 In America, scores of virtually interchangeable Christmas-themed television movies celebrate \u201credemption through romance\u201d non-stop through the season, with little or (usually) no specific religious content at all.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n What can explain the appeal of Christmas to people well beyond the community of committed Christian believers?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n First of all, it must be recognized that a superficial view of Christmas can easily be rendered much less threatening, theologically speaking, than Easter.\u00a0 Everybody can accept and celebrate the birth of a baby, whereas the revivification and eventual ascent to heaven of a crucified man is difficult to reconcile with a non-Christian or even secular worldview.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n It seems clear, though, that there is a very great deal, even in the most watered-down versions of Christmas (as illustrated in those television movies), that speaks to the deepest longings of human hearts around the world.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Whatever our culture or religious views, for instance, the message sung by the angels to the shepherds of Bethlehem two thousand years ago resonates with all of us:\u00a0 \u201cPeace on earth, good will toward men\u201d (compare Luke 2:14).\u00a0 Every Lifetime or Hallmark movie concludes with love and harmony, things for which we all yearn.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The practice of gift-giving reminds us of the generous, kind people we would like to be and among whom we would like to live.\u00a0\u00a0 Think of the chastened and redeemed miser Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens\u2019s 1843 novella \u201cA Christmas Carol,\u201d which, like the television movies that proliferate during the Christmas season, is not an explicitly Christian tale:\u00a0 The new Scrooge became both generous and beloved, and, as Dickens writes, \u201cit was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The birth of a baby\u2014any baby\u2014is a moment of hope and the inauguration of virtually boundless possibilities, and Christmas powerfully reminds us of these things once more each year.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Finally, the image of the Holy Family, of the little baby snugly wrapped against the cold and lying in a manger, reminds us of the security and warmth of our own homes and families, whether as they really are or as we aspire for them to be.\u00a0 These are the kinds of homes and families conjured up, too, in many beloved Austrian Christmas carols and in the Victorian illustrations of father and mother and children\u2014even Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and their young family\u2014gathered by the hearth and around the Christmas tree, then fairly recently introduced from Germany.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n We all yearn for lives of love, safety, harmony, warmth, kindness, generosity, and possibility.\u00a0 But this is not our world. \u00a0Christmas, however, whispers that we\u2019re strangers here, and we feel that we have wandered from a more exalted sphere.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Finally, here are some links that you might like for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day:<\/p>\n \u201cThe Light of Jesus Christ: A Christmas Message from President Russell M. Nelson\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Wall Street Journal<\/em>:\u00a0 \u201cIn Hoc Anno Domini<\/em>:\u00a0\u00a0This editorial was written in 1949 by the late Vermont Royster and has been published annually since.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cCharles Dickens\u2019s \u2018A Christmas Carol\u2019 Review: The Soul\u2019s Rebirth: The seasonal classic is a masterpiece of carefully orchestrated\u2014and cleansing\u2014emotional release.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cTelling ghost stories is a lost tradition on Christmas Eve\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 (This article was originally published in 2010 by a brilliant young writer to whom \u2014 poor fellow! \u2014 I happen to be related.)<\/p>\n \u201cKetanji Brown Jackson Is Wrong about\u00a0It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/i>: The Supreme Court justice appears to have totally missed the point of the movie.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n