Happy New Year!

Marie-Antoinette (center) accompanied to a costume ball by Artois, Monsieur and Madame.

Wishing all the readers of Tea at Trianon a New Year of blessings and joy! Share

Victor Davis Hanson Debunks Tucker Carlson’s Claims About Israel

 From The Daily Signal:

I would like to say it pains me to say this, but the Tucker that is talking is not the one that I had a seven-to-eight-year relationship every Monday after the monologue. But to be frank, everything he just said is demonstrably untrue. It’s not an insignificant country. Let me not just say platitudes but let me be precise and offer examples and data. 

First of all, Israel is the home of half of the Judeo-Christian, and you can argue the whole home of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It’s the protector of Jerusalem. Does Tucker really believe that Jerusalem in the hands of the Jordanians was better than under the Israelis? Does he really believe that prior to the existence of Israel, the Middle East was a better place? So, it’s got historical and cultural value.

He’s talking about Qatar, which is an autocracy. And I have always said that there was no strategic point in demonizing Saudi Arabia in the way that Joe Biden did. Said it was a rogue nation, then he turned around and begged it to pump oil.  

Tucker, there’s not one constitutional government there. When you say they have three million people in Qatar, there’s only about 20 % are citizens. The rest are helots. That is, they are laborers with no civil rights. (Read more.)

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The Lighthouse of Alexandria

From The Greek Reporter:

The Lighthouse of Alexandria, the last standing of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was an engineering marvel that served to guide ships to the port city.

It was completed in the 3rd century BC during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the son of Ptolemy I, the Macedonian Greek general of Alexander the Great, on the island of Pharos off the coast of the city of Alexandria in Egypt.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria was a beacon, safely guiding seamen sailing the Mediterranean to Egypt for fifteen centuries.

It was one of the greatest architectural feats of antiquity, serving as a symbol of power of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, the successors of Alexander the Great, who was the founder of the city of Alexandria.

An important landmark of the Hellenistic period, the Lighthouse of Alexandria had travelers from all over the world who were encouraged to visit the port city to admire the tower. (Read more.)

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After the Hunt (2025)

  

I finally was able to see After the Hunt and am not surprised that it received such poor reviews. Not that there is anything wrong with the quality of the film. Rather the film displays the destructive Wokeness present on our college campuses, and so has incurred the censure of the Leftist press. From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

Hollywood has finally adapted my book to the big screen. Oh, they changed the title, and I’m not getting any credit. But trust me, After the Hunt, the new film starring Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield, is very much the story I tell in my 2022 book The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi.

  Before going any further, let me say that I am going to be reviewing key plot points in After the Hunt and giving away major spoilers and the conclusion. If you plan on seeing the movie, you’ve been warned. 

    After the Hunt is about how false #MeToo accusations can create a mob atmosphere and destroy lives, even driving people to suicide. It’s particularly bad if the setting is academia, where hyper-sensitive prevails even as students and faculty tremor to ruin anyone who doesn’t parrot leftist wokespeak.

    After the Hunt stars Julia Roberts as Alma, a Yale philosophy professor who is about to get tenure. She is married to a psychotherapist, Frederik, and is close friends with Hank (Andrew Garfield). Alma’s best student is Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). One night, Maggie and Hank leave a cocktail party together. The next day, Maggie tells Alma that Hank sexually assaulted her. Hank replies that Maggie fabricated the story after he confronted her about plagiarism. This conflict creates hysteria on campus, with all of the characters in danger of losing their careers and their sanity.

    I know what you’re thinking. A major Hollywood movie starring Julia Roberts and about #MeToo is not going to come down on the side of men, socially, when the character making the accusation is a minority and a lesbian. And yet - hang on - that’s exactly what happens. Star student and protege Maggie is in fact a plagiarist. Her professors pretend to think she’s brilliant because she’s the daughter of big donors and, as Michelle Goldberg put it in the New York Times, “presumably, because she’s Black and queer.” “You are the worst kind of mediocre student,” Alma tells Maggie. “With every availability to succeed but no talent or desire to do so, yet so many resources, so much of other people’s time is wasted on you.” This dialogue actually made it into a Hollywood movie starring Julia Roberts. (Read more.)

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PRAVDA

 From Tierney's Real News:

PRAVDA began publication in May of 1912 in the Russian Empire and it emerged as the leading Communist newspaper of the Soviet Union after the Communists overthrew Russia in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The newspaper was an organ of the Central Communist Committee of the USSR from 1912 to 1991 - for over 75 years - when the Soviet Union was finally “allegedly” dissolved and scattered all over the world.

 Pravda is a Russian word meaning "truth" - which is a joke because they didn't report truth at all! They were YELLOW journalists. The fake news in America copies the PRAVDA method and uses yellow journalism all the time - a sensationalist news style using exaggerated headlines, scandals, and emotional appeals - to create a left-wing manufactured alternate view of reality instead of the truth. 

 The headline below from Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is a great example of PRAVDA yellow journalism in America today. They are telling you that you shouldn't believe your eyes and ears - that things aren't as great as you think they are and you should be GLOOMY and DEPRESSED. And this is supposed to be a conservative newspaper! No matter how good things get under President Trump, PRAVDA will tell you different until you agree to usher in Communism to save you! (Read more.)

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The Tortured Soul of Léon Bloy

 From Angelus:

Although he is considered the father of the “Catholic” novel, Bloy is more famous for quotations extracted from them and from his brilliant and controversial journals published during his lifetime.

One journal was titled “Pilgrim of the Absolute,” which also became Bloy’s honorary title. Another, called “Bloy Before the Swine,” included a harsh depiction of his life in a Paris suburb. Those whom he’d turned to in his abject poverty and helped him probably agreed with another honorific, “The Ungrateful Beggar,” which was the title of another volume. His thought was that he could not compromise his writing or vocation, and expected others to support him in what publishers and the public refused to do.

It is a cliché that a prophet’s mission is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But that seems to have been Bloy’s modus operandi.

France had responded with enthusiasm to the 1846 apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to two young visionaries in the hamlet of La Salette. Its message of repentance was embraced by many but became controversial, even though the local bishop and the Vatican supported the claims.

But one of the visionaries, Melanie Calvat, felt that the message of Our Lady was not being correctly reflected and prophesied a coming disaster for the French Church. Her ideas resonated with Bloy, who became Calvat’s advocate and challenged the French hierarchy and the congregations who served as chaplains on the mountain where pilgrims visited the shrine built to mark the apparition. In his typical absolutist style, he said what had started with the charism of repentance associated with La Salette was now a matter of “hoteliers and merchants of soup,” because of the guesthouses run by the congregation on the “holy mountain.”

His identification with the cause of Calvat was a reflection of Bloy’s sympathy with those who were on the losing side of life. He also published defenses of Columbus and Napoleon, both of whom he judged maligned by historians.

Perhaps most quixotically, he believed, or wanted to believe, that the son of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, known to history as Louis XVII, had somehow survived imprisonment by Jacobin revolutionaries and lived in the Netherlands, missing all the action of the Napoleonic regime and the Bourbon Restoration. Bloy was fascinated with the idea that the powers of Europe knew the true heir to the French throne was alive and feared his possible restoration. (Read more.)

 

My novel about Louis XVII, HERE.

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Envisioning Old St. Peter's Basilica

 

 I have just read Scotti's Basilica about the construction of the current St. Peter's Basilica in Rome and it made me curious about what the old St. Peter's looked like. From Liturgical Arts Journal:

Old St. Peter's was a classic Roman basilica from all accounts, and like any basilica that had survived for over a millennium, we have to bear in mind that there were changes to the interior decoration and arrangement as the centuries slipped past. In that regard, our considerations of what "Old St. Peter's" was like has to be a layered considerations of its history, just as does history generally in its own right. The general layout of the interior basilica was classically 'Roman' and one need only bring to mind the basilica of St. Paul's to picture it. The following diagram shows the layout of old St. Peter's as it stood in the middle ageas:

Anyone who has visited San Paolo will immediately recognize the similarities with the double row of columns lining the nave leading up toward the high altar. While not all of these features shown here were to be found in the Constantinian era, the bones of the basilica are indeed Constantinian in its basic basilica form. (Read more.)

 

From Church Pop:

The current St. Peter’s Basilica is one of the most beautiful churches in the whole world. With parts of it designed by such greats as Michelangelo and Bernini, it was was built over a 120 year period in the 16th and 17th centuries and remains the largest church in the world.

But it was not the first St. Peter’s Basilica.

Before the current St. Peter’s Basilica there was another church in roughly the same location with the same name, now often referred to as the Old St. Peter’s Basilica.

 The Old St. Peter’s Basilica was truly a wonder and treasure of the church. Commissioned by Emperor Constantine in the early 4th century, it served the church for nearly 1200 years. Its altar was built atop what was believed to be the tomb of St. Peter, and its footprint overlapped with the old Circus of Nero – the site of St. Peter’s martyrdom. (Read more.)

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“Ghost” Daycare Centers in Minnesota

 From Sharyl's Substack:

A series of social media videos released in recent days by independent journalist Nick Shirley has focused scrutiny on Minnesota’s taxpayer funded child care assistance programs.

The videos allege widespread fraud involving empty child care facilities that have collectively received tens of millions in taxpayer dollars.

But potential fraud surrounding Somali-owned day care centers dates back years.

In the new videos, Shirley is accompanied by a longtime local investigator identified as David – who says he has monitored these sites for years noticing no children (but sometimes adults outside smoking).

Shirley and David visit several Minneapolis daycare centers during business hours, finding locked doors, blacked-out windows, and no signs of children despite licenses for dozens or even hundreds of kids.

The investigation comes as federal prosecutors describe “industrial-scale” fraud across Minnesota’s social services, potentially exceeding $1 billion, much of it linked to the state’s large Somali community. (Read more.)

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The Sobieskis and Stuarts – the Splendour and Spectre of the Crown

 From Wilanow Palace:

The exhibition The Sobieskis and Stuarts – the Splendour and Spectre of the Crown is the first in Poland to trace a common thread in the modern history of two distant countries: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. It has its origin in the marriage in 1719 between Maria Clementina Sobieska (known as Clementina), the granddaughter of King Jan III, and James III/VIII of the royal House of Stuart, claimant to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Motivated politically and financially, the marriage brought together two people of different nationalities, raised in different cultures. However, they shared the experience of a life begun within the splendour of the crown, but which became increasingly distant as the years passed. Clementina’s father, Jakub Sobieski, lost the struggle for the throne of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the election after the death of King Jan III. James’ father, the Catholic King James II/VII, lost his thrones after the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688.

After their marriage, Clementina and James settled in Rome, where they were regarded as the rightful sovereigns of England, Scotland, and Ireland. However, the burden of the Stuart Cause and their efforts to regain power in the three kingdoms cast a shadow over their lives and the fate of their sons, Charles Edward and Henry Benedict.

In tracing the story of its main characters, this exhibition illustrates intricate dynastic relationships, the lives of individuals in the face of high politics, and of the art that became a political tool, yet which retains its high, timeless aesthetic value. In particular, Clementina’s life demonstrates the often-impossible situation of women from royal families, of whom so much, and so much sacrifice, was expected in the role which fate imposed upon them. (Read more.)

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The Coventry Carol

Christmas is tinged with sorrow. From A Clerk at Oxford:

Lullay, lullay, thou little tiny Child,
By, by, lully, lullay.
Lullay, lullay, thou little tiny child.
By, by, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do,
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
By, by, lully, lullay.

Herod the King, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day
His men of might, in his own sight,
All young children to slay.

Then woe is me, poor child, for thee,
And ever mourn and may,
For thy parting, nor say nor sing,
By, by, lully, lullay.

The Coventry Carol is among the medieval carols most often heard today, and I find the popularity of this profoundly sad song at Christmastime intriguing. As John of Grimestone's lullaby suggests, there are actually a considerable number of medieval lullabies which share the mood of the Coventry Carol: somewhere between lullaby and lament, full of melancholy and pity for the child being comforted, whether it's Herod's victims, the Christ-child, or any human baby born into a weeping world. (Here's another beautiful example.) I wonder if the popularity of the Coventry Carol today indicates that it expresses something people don't find in the usual run of joyful Christmas carols - this song of grief, of innocence cruelly destroyed. Holy Innocents is not an easy feast for a modern audience to understand, and I'll confess I find the medieval manuscript images of children impaled on spears just horrible - but then, they are meant to be, and they're horrible because they're all too close to the reality of the world we live in. The idea that this is incongruous with the Christmas season (as you often hear people say) is largely a modern scruple, I think. It's our modern idea that Christmas is primarily a cheery festival for happy children and families - our images of Christmas joy, both secular and sacred, are all childlike wonder and picture-perfect families gathered round the tree. This is very nice, of course, for those who have (or are) children, or happy families, but for those who don't - those who have lost children or parents, who face loneliness or exclusion, who want but don't have children, family, or home - it can be deeply painful. (Read more.)

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The Score

 From Blacklisted:

The women of the West became the stenographers for the rapists who did this to our sisters. Jewish women have been silenced. Our rapists are the “doctors” and “journalists” that performative professional feminists of the West spend their days advocating for. They fight for these Palestinians who are “just following orders”, right? We will never forgive the women who sided with rapists for power and popularity. Who lionized, celebrated, deified, and glorified this Islamic cult of rape.

Everywhere I look today are posts about Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. Don’t get me wrong. Epstein’s victims deserve to be spoken about. But why is the rape cult of Epstein more palatable in the public discourse than the still active rape cult of Jihad that continues to be a threat in the present moment? Is it more comfortable to be angry at the past? What about the almighty Hamas of now? What about the current power of ISIS? Courage is not selective. Decency is not discriminate. Upholding the truth is not picky.

If you purport to be an advocate for women, rape should make your blood boil. You should understand what rape is. You should recognize it when it is being described by a survivor. And that recognition should overtake any of your own personal need for attention, validation or recognition. That is what it means to speak up for women. Unless, of course, that was never what it meant for some of these self-congratulatory women’s rights voices. Unless, of course, these posers were using other women’s trauma to advance their own “fame”. (Read more.)

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A Renowned Medievalist, Poet, and Fencer

Professor Rachel Fulton Brown from the University of Chicago. From The European Conservative:

Conservatives need to stop letting the Adversary define the terms of the debate, starting with the concept of sin. The very concept of sin is anathema to modern feminism, convinced as it is that men are to blame for all the woes of human existence. I exaggerate, but only slightly. The gender debate, such as it is, is a debate about where to place blame for the differences between the sexes, with women claiming that they should be able to behave like men sexually while at the same time blaming men for behaving like men. The upshot is that everyone is unhappy, blaming each other for not being empathetic enough to anticipate each other’s every need. There is no antidote because nobody is willing to acknowledge his or her role in creating the situation, famously encapsulated in that moment in a certain garden when, convinced it would give them power to overcome their own nature, the first woman and the first man ate of the fruit they had been forbidden to eat thinking it would make them “as Gods” (Gen. 3:5). This original sin of disobedience has, according to Christian teaching following the Apostle Paul, defined human nature ever since: women being persuaded that God lied to them about who they are, and men going along with the women like so many Macbeths.

And yet, into this tale of sorrow comes the Virgin Mary, our second Eve, who rather than fighting God’s will for her, consents to become the Mother of God. Mary’s obedience presents modern feminism with an insurmountable challenge. Was this not rape, as so many have argued; after all, how could Mary have possibly said, “No”? Everything hinges on this question. In the 12th century, Mary’s consent would become axiomatic for the sacramental definition of marriage: just as God would not have taken flesh from the Virgin without her consent, so both the bride and the bridegroom must make verbal consent (“I do”) to their marriage. Ironically (our story is filled with irony), from a Christian perspective, the feminist rejection of patriarchal marriage is a rejection of the one institution founded on a woman’s God-given right to say, “No,” precisely because God did not rape the Virgin Mary, but rather sent his messenger to obtain her consent (“Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum,” “Let it be to me according to your word,” Luke 1:38).

But why did Mary say, ‘Yes’? ‘She was special, alone of all her sex; nobody could be as perfect as she,’ reply her feminist sisters. ‘She sets an impossible ideal.’ To me, as a daughter of Eve, this has always sounded like envy: ‘I wish I could be as beautiful and beloved as she.’ Modern women will deny it, but their taste in romance literature suggests otherwise; likewise, the sorrow they express at not being able to find the man of their dreams who will treat them like the queen they know (and tell each other) they are. As I have tried to show in my scholarship, what they fail to appreciate is how much their fantasies depend on stories told about the Virgin Mary, specifically, stories told about the Virgin Mary through commentaries on the Song of Songs in which stories Mary is given the role of the bride pursued by the bridegroom to become his beloved queen. “You are all beautiful, O my love, and there is no spot in thee,” the bridegroom tells her (Song 4:7). “My soul melted when he spoke,” she tells her companions (Song 5:6). “One is my dove, my perfect one is but one, she is the only one of her mother, the chosen of her that bore her,” he tells his associates (Song 6:8). Every modern romance novel that casts the hero as elusive, strangely powerful, ancient and brooding draws on this tradition; every woman who imagines herself pursued by a loving God-man is heiress to the medieval tradition of mystical longing. (Read more.)

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Jesus Christ the Apple Tree

It is St. John's day, which is the name-day of my late father. This early American carol was one of his favorites. It invokes images of Eden and the lost earthly paradise, while bringing to mind the Tree of Life which is the Cross. From Hymns and Carols of Christmas:

1. The tree of life my soul hath seen,
Laden with fruit and always green:
The trees of nature fruitless be
Compared with Christ the apple tree.
2. His beauty doth all things excel:
By faith I know, but ne'er can tell
The glory which I now can see
In Jesus Christ the apple tree.
3. For happiness I long have sought,
And pleasure dearly I have bought:
I missed of all; but now I see
'Tis found in Christ the apple tree.
4. I'm weary with my former toil,
Here I will sit and rest awhile:
Under the shadow I will be,
Of Jesus Christ the apple tree.
5. This fruit doth make my soul to thrive,
It keeps my dying faith alive;
Which makes my soul in haste to be
With Jesus Christ the apple tree.

From The Thinking Housewife: "The lyrics were written by an unknown poet in the 18th century and call to mind the tradition in the Middle Ages of decorating Christmas trees with apples, symbolic of the Tree of Knowledge." (Read more.)

The Tree of Life and Death

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Rubio Gives Warning About Future Of Western Civilization

 From The Patriotic Voice:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a message to Europe that needed to be said. Keep erasing your culture, and you’ll have nothing left worth defending.

“If you erase your shared history, your shared culture, your shared ideology, your shared priorities, your shared principles, then what — then you just have a straight-up defense agreement. That’s all you have.”

The European response? Germany’s chancellor called it “unacceptable.” The EU’s unelected leader demanded America stop “interfering” in European democracy. Translation: Stop noticing what we’re doing to ourselves.

The White House’s National Security Strategy memo didn’t mince words. Europe faces “civilizational erasure” if it continues globalist policies of mass migration and attacks on fundamental liberties like freedom of speech. That’s not diplomatic language. That’s a warning from an ally watching a slow-motion suicide. (Read more.)

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The Man Behind 'The Nutcracker'

 From The Conversation:

So how does The Nutcracker and the Mouse King fit into this strange body of work?

Hoffmann’s original tale is no innocent sugarcoated fantasy. The story was written for his friend Hitzig’s children, Marie and Fritz. It is a veiled critique of the strictures Hitzig and his social class placed on his children’s freedom.

The story is, tellingly, set in a household named Stahlbaum, or “Steel Tree”: a fortress of sorts that is infiltrated by the mysterious Drosselmeier. 

In Hoffmann’s tale, Marie is positioned as the novice who must learn to use and trust her imagination. Only her imaginative vision can animate – literally and metaphysically – the mundane world that surrounds her and fulfil her dreams and desires. Drosselmeier is a figure analogous to Hoffmann, cultivating Marie Hitzig’s imagination within and outside of the story.

This clashing of worlds is not without its trauma. Hoffmann’s story ends on a sombre note, with Marie’s visions being dismissed by her family as nonsense. Mocked into outward submission, she never speaks of these adventures again. Ridiculed as a dreamer, she becomes reserved. But in her mind’s eye, she returns from time to time to “those glorious days”.

Hoffmann’s ending leaves us suspended between sadness at the suppression of Marie’s childhood imagination and triumph at the quiet persistence of her imaginative spirit. (Read more.)

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'Sing we Yule til Candlemas'

From A Clerk of Oxford:

As a lover of carols, I'm much in favour of the medieval practice of celebrating Christmas to some degree all through the dark days of January, so today I thought I would post a carol which encourages us to keep singing throughout this season. It runs through not just the twelve days of Christmas but also the forty days of the Christmas season, all the way up to Candlemas, the Feast of the Purification, on February 2. It's a fifteenth-century carol (from Bodleian MS Eng. poet. e. I), and the unmodernised text can be found on this site, which also lists the various feasts mentioned: St Stephen on the 26th, St John on the 27th, the Holy Innocents on the 28th, St Thomas Becket on the 29th (check back soon for more carols about him!), the Circumcision of Christ on January 1st, Epiphany and Candlemas.

Make we mirth
For Christ's birth,
And sing we Yule til Candlemas.

(Read more.)

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The Sacred Earthiness of Christmas

 From George Weigel at First Things:

Christianity begins in a real place, at a specific point in time in which real men and women met an itinerant rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth—and after what they had thought to be the utter catastrophe of his degrading and violent death, met him anew as the Risen Lord Jesus. The lives of those real men and women were so transformed by these encounters that they, in turn, went out and got to work on the task the Risen One gave them: to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19). 

The earthiness of the Christmas story—the manger, the stable, the “swaddling clothes,” the stolid oxen and lowing cows, the bewildered but kindly shepherds, the exotic Magi from the East and their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the child’s circumcision—underscores this core Christian conviction: The Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, the “Word” through whom “all things were made” (John 1:1, 3), entered history through the cooperation of a Jewish girl and her overshadowing by the Holy Spirit, and was born at a precise moment in time at a precise place. Whether “the first cuttings of His infant hair” really are in Rome’s Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem may be beyond historical verification; the real point being made in such claims is that the incarnate Son of God really was at one point in his life among us, an infant who had an infant’s hair and all the other attributes of a weak and defenseless child. 

Ditto for what is really being proposed by the “napkins,” the cradle, St. Joseph’s blanket-cloak, and all the rest: He whom Christianity proclaims as Lord and Savior, the One who fully reveals both the truth about God and the truth about our humanity’s dignity and destiny, was not a character in some virtual reality “metaverse” constructed by Mark Zuckerberg. He was here, on this third planet of the solar system. And he is still with us: in the Scriptures proclaimed, and above all in the holy bread broken and shared. (Read more.)

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How Shakespeare Helped Shape Christmas As We Know It Today

From Daniel McCarthy at The New York Post:

“Hamlet” isn’t altogether a Christmas play, but Christmas is a conspicuous part of it. And there is good reason to think that “Hamlet” was much on the minds of two authors who shaped modern conceptions of Christmas in the 19th century. Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (“’Twas the night before Christmas. . .”) includes the charming line “Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse” — which echoes the guard at Elsinore who reports “Not a mouse stirring.” Twenty years later in “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens would refer to Hamlet’s ghost in his own tale of yuletide hauntings.

In fact, Dickens observes the rule Marcellus set down in “Hamlet”: The ghosts are gone, their work accomplished, by the dawn of Christmas Day. There’s a faint reminder of “Hamlet” in an earlier Dickens tale set at Christmas as well. As in “Hamlet,” an impudent gravedigger features in a Christmas episode of “The Pickwick Papers,” “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton.” Curiously, the goblin who first accosts the gravedigger has a catchphrase — “Ho! Ho! Ho!” — now familiar with a very different Christmas character. Moore and Dickens knew their Shakespeare, and when they set out to create new stories for the season, they didn’t forget the precedents the Bard had provided, few though they were.

“A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins,” says Mamillius in “The Winter’s Tale.” In Shakespeare’s day, sprites and goblins — and ghosts — were seasonally appropriate before Christmas. There’s debate about whether Shakespeare invented the “Marcellus rule” that banned such beings from Christmas Day onward, through Twelfth Night on the eve of Epiphany. Yet if there were no ghosts, there were other kinds of spirits. The “Twelve Days of Christmas” were a time of revelry — drinking, singing, putting on plays, and merriment — when not Santa Claus but a “Lord of Misrule” was the mascot of the season.

In Shakespeare’s age Puritans, much like Hamlet, were scandalized by bibulous customs like the wassail. “Hamlet” reminds us that our Christmas troubles and soul-searching are not altogether new. Shakespeare, too, had to ask whether his country had lost its values: Was it Christian or pagan, Catholic or Protestant, stoically philosophical or, like Hamlet in his agony, nihilistic and despairingly materialist? (Read more.)

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Merry Christmas!

The Nativity by Giotto

And a Happy New Year! Thanks to everyone who has visited this blog in 2025~ I will pray for you all this Christmas Day in the morning. Please pray for me.

Welcome, all wonders in one sight!

       Eternity shut in a span;

Summer in winter; day in night;

       Heaven in earth, and God in man.

Great little one, whose all-embracing birth

Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth.

 ~  from "In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord" by Richard Crashaw

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Christmas Scenes

From East of the Sun, West of the Moon. And Christmas trees, HERE.

And scenes of winter, too. Happy New Year!

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Last Will and Testament of Louis XVI

The last Will and Testament of Louis XVI, King of France and Navarre, given on Christmas day, 1792.

In the name of the Very holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

To-day, the 25th day of December, 1792, I, Louis XVI King of France, being for more than four months imprisoned with my family in the tower of the Temple at Paris, by those who were my subjects, and deprived of all communication whatsoever, even with my family, since the eleventh instant; moreover, involved in a trial the end of which it is impossible to foresee, on account of the passions of men, and for which one can find neither pretext nor means in any existing law, and having no other witnesses, for my thoughts than God to whom I can address myself, I hereby declare, in His presence, my last wishes and feelings.

I leave my soul to God, my creator; I pray Him to receive it in His mercy, not to judge it according to its merits but according to those of Our Lord Jesus Christ who has offered Himself as a sacrifice to God His Father for us other men, no matter how hardened, and for me first.

I die in communion with our Holy Mother, the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church, which holds authority by an uninterrupted succession, from St. Peter, to whom Jesus Christ entrusted it; I believe firmly and I confess all that is contained in the creed and the commandments of God and the Church, the sacraments and the mysteries, those which the Catholic Church teaches and has always taught. I never pretend to set myself up as a judge of the various way of expounding the dogma which rend the church of Jesus Christ, but I agree and will always agree, if God grant me life the decisions which the ecclesiastical superiors of the Holy Catholic Church give and will always give, in conformity with the disciplines which the Church has followed since Jesus Christ.

I pity with all my heart our brothers who may be in error but I do not claim to judge them, and I do not love them less in Christ, as our Christian charity teaches us, and I pray to God to pardon all my sins. I have sought scrupulously to know them, to detest them and to humiliate myself in His presence. Not being able to obtain the ministration of a Catholic priest, I pray God to receive the confession which I feel in having put my name (although this was against my will) to acts which might be contrary to the discipline and the belief of the Catholic church, to which I have always remained sincerely attached. I pray God to receive my firm resolution, if He grants me life, to have the ministrations of a Catholic priest, as soon as I can, in order to confess my sins and to receive the sacrament of penance.

I beg all those whom I might have offended inadvertently (for I do not recall having knowingly offended any one), or those whom I may have given bad examples or scandals, to pardon the evil which they believe I could have done them.

I beseech those who have the kindness to join their prayers to mine, to obtain pardon from God for my sins.

I pardon with all my heart those who made themselves my enemies, without my have given them any cause, and I pray God to pardon them, as well as those who, through false or misunderstood zeal, did me much harm.

I commend to God my wife and my children, my sister, my aunts, my brothers, and all those who are attached to me by ties of blood or by whatever other means. I pray God particularly to cast eyes of compassion upon my wife, my children, and my sister, who suffered with me for so long a time, to sustain them with His mercy if they shall lose me, and as long as they remain in his mortal world.

I commend my children to my wife; I have never doubted her maternal tenderness for them. I enjoin her above all to make them good Christians and honest individuals; to make them view the grandeurs of this world (if they are condemned to experience them) as very dangerous and transient goods, and turn their attention towards the one solid and enduring glory, eternity. I beseech my sister to kindly continue her tenderness for my children and to take the place of a mother, should they have the misfortune of losing theirs.

I beg my wife to forgive all the pain which she suffered for me, and the sorrows which I may have caused her in the course of our union; and she may feel sure that I hold nothing against her, if she has anything with which to reproach herself.

I most warmly enjoin my children that, after what they owe to God, which should come first, they should remain forever united among themselves, submissive and obedient to their mother, and grateful for all the care and trouble which she has taken with them, as well as in memory of me. I beg them to regard my sister as their second mother.

I exhort my son, should he have the misfortune of becoming king, to remember he owes himself wholly to the happiness of his fellow citizens; that he should forget all hates and all grudges, particularly those connected with the misfortunes and sorrows which I am experiencing; that he can make the people happy only by ruling according to laws: but at the same time to remember that a king cannot make himself respected and do the good that is in his heart unless he has the necessary authority, and that otherwise, being tangled up in his activities and not inspiring respect, he is more harmful than useful.

I exhort my son to care for all the persons who are attached to me, as much as his circumstances will allow, to remember that it is a sacred debt which I have contracted towards the children and relatives of those who have perished for me and also those who are wretched for my sake. I know that there are many persons, among those who were near me, who did not conduct themselves towards me as they should have and who have even shown ingratitude, but I pardon them (often in moments of trouble and turmoil one is not master of oneself), and I beg my son that, if he finds an occasion, he should think only of their misfortunes.

I should have wanted here to show my gratitude to those who have given me a true and disinterested affection; if, on the one hand, I was keenly hurt by the ingratitude and disloyalty of those to whom I have always shown kindness, as well as to their relatives and friends, on the other hand I have had the consolation of seeing the affection and voluntary interest which many persons have shown me. I beg them to receive my thanks.

In the situation in which matters still are, I fear to compromise them if I should speak more explicitly, but I especially enjoin my son to seek occasion to recognize them.

I should, nevertheless, consider it a calumny on the nation if I did not openly recommend to my son MM. De Chamilly and Hue, whose genuine attachment for me led them to imprison themselves with me in this sad abode. I also recommend Clery, for whose attentiveness I have nothing but praise ever since he has been with me. Since it is he who has remained with me until the end, I beg the gentlemen of the commune to hand over to him my clothes, my books, my watch, my purse, and all other small effects which have been deposited with the council of the commune.

I pardon again very readily those who guard me, the ill treatment and the vexations which they thought it necessary to impose upon me. I found a few sensitive and compassionate souls among them – may they in their hearts enjoy the tranquillity which their way of thinking gives them.

I beg MM. De Malesherbes, Tronchet and De Seze to receive all my thanks and the expressions of my feelings for all the cares and troubles they took for me.

I finish by declaring before God, and ready to appear before Him, that I do not reproach myself with any of the crimes with which I am charged.

Made in duplicate in the Tower of the Temple, the 25th of December 1792.

LOUIS

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Coronation of Charlemagne

On Christmas Day, 800, Charles the Great, King of the Franks, was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III at St. Peter's Basilica. According to one account:

On the day of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ all [who had been present at the council] came together again in the same basilica of blessed Peter the apostle. And then the venerable and holy pontiff, with his own hands, crowned [Charles] with a most precious crown. Then all the faithful Romans, seeing how he loved the holy Roman church and its vicar and how he defended them, cried out with one voice by the will of God and of St. Peter, the key-bearer of the kingdom of heaven, "To Charles, most pious Augustus, crowned by God, great and peace-loving emperor, life and victory."(Salus et victoria) This was said three times before the sacred tomb of blessed Peter the apostle, with the invocation of many saints, and he was instituted by all as emperor of the Romans. Thereupon, on that same day of the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, the most holy bishop and pontiff anointed his most excellent son Charles as king with holy oil.

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“Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day”

 From The Imaginative Conservative:

William Sandys (1792-1874) was an antiquarian by hobby—a “person who collects or studies old things” or “a student of the past,” according to Webster’s. The things Sandys happened to collect were Christmas songs. His 1833 publication Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern helped to launch the Victorian revival of the holiday, a revival that followed centuries of puritan neglect.[*] Sandys claimed in his book to have unearthed English yuletide songs dating back four centuries. Making their first appearance in print were many carols we now take for granted, such as “The First Noel,” “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” and “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.”

Although it hasn’t soared to those heights of popularity, “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day” is richly fascinating nonetheless. The text has turns of phrase redolent of the Middle Ages or Renaissance, yet no source for the song prior to Sandys has been found. What is most remarkable about “Dancing Day” is that it narrates the entire story of Christ’s life in Christ’s own voice, and that it describes the story of salvation with the image of a dance:

Tomorrow shall be my dancing day;
I would my true love did so chance
To see the legend of my play,
To call my true love to the dance.

Refrain:

Sing, oh! My love, oh! My love, my love, my love,
This have I done for my true love.

Most scholars agree that the text goes back far earlier than 1833, with the phrase “legend of my play” a possible clue that the carol was connected to the medieval mystery plays. Musicologists Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott write:

It seems possible that ‘Tomorrow shall be’ was devised to be sung and danced at the conclusion of the first day of a three-day drama . . . The actor portraying Christ would have sung the verses and the whole company and audience the repeats of the refrains.

Hymn texts in which Christ himself speaks—a device one commentator refers to as vox Christi—are rare, making a theatrical origin for “Dancing Day” even more likely.

Mystery plays were one of the three distinctive medieval forms of theater, the other two being miracle plays and morality plays. All three types evolved out of short scenes performed in church by the clergy as an adjunct to the liturgy and depicting biblical subjects such as the Creation, Adam, and Eve, or the Last Judgment. Mystery plays eventually moved out of church premises into the village square, often traveled from town to town on wagons, and became increasingly elaborate.

As the plays traveled to various locales, they were often advertised by the players in a song called a “banns.” If our carol originally formed part of a mystery play about the life of Christ, the “dancing day” on the “morrow” might refer to the subsequent part of the play, treating the Redemption.

Most striking is the relationship between Christ and humanity being likened to that of a lover and his “true love,” with the refrain’s expressive repetitions of “my love.” This motif hearkens back to the love poetry of the Song of Songs, in which the lover and beloved are traditionally interpreted as representing Christ and the church or Christ and the soul. The idea of Christ and humanity being united as bridegroom and bride is a classic Christian motif, but we are surprised to find it in a popular Christmas carol, and even more to find the image extended to depict Christ as our dancing partner. There is a good amount of theology and scripture in “Dancing Day,” such as the treatment of the Incarnation:

Then was I born of a virgin pure;
Of her I took fleshly substance.
Thus was I knit to man’s nature
To call my true love to the dance.

In a manger laid and wrapped I was,
So very poor; this was my chance,
Betwixt an ox and a silly poor ass,
To call my true love to my dance.

(Read more.)

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Irish Christmas Blessings and Carols

From Ireland Calling:

Carols are also important in an Irish Christmas. Ireland has its fair share of original carols such as The Wexford Carol and While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night. Many others have been translated into Irish and performed by leading artists. These are some of Ireland’s best known Christmas blessing and carols.

The Wexford Carol is one of the most famous and most popular hymns to come out of Ireland. Its origins are uncertain but it certainly dates back several centuries. It originated in Co Wexford and first came to wider prominence due to the work of William Grattan Flood who was the organist at St Aidan’s Cathedral in Enniscorthy. He first came across the carol when he heard it being sung by a local singer in Wexford in the 19th century. He started to perform it at Christmas services in the cathedral and it was later published in the Oxford Book of Carols. It soon became a standard in carol books across the world. (Read more.)

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Into the Mystery of the Baby Jesus

 From Daily Compass:

And yet neither the intemperate weather, nor the bitter cold, nor the long celebration that lasted until five in the morning, could dissuade those who sought Paradise in the eyes of the Saint during the night that was the most special of all nights. “At the end,” one of his brothers recounts, “Padre Pio put on the white veil woven with gold, incensed the statue of the Baby Jesus, and preceded by the altar boys and some of his brothers who held lighted torches in their hands, he carried it in procession from the choir to the altar and from the altar to the Crib, clutching the little cradle closely to himself…. Then, he offered the beloved statuette to the faithful to kiss. His face was radiant, luminous. His lips were full of joyful smiles as everyone kissed the knees or the little feet of the Baby Jesus. Then “with an open heart and a clear voice,” he united himself to the choir of his brothers and the faithful in singing Tu Scendi Dalle Stelle, the sweet Christmas carol composed by Saint Alphonsus Maria de’Liguori.

It is particularly beautiful then to listen to the testimony of those who learned to live the Christmas mystery at the side of the humble friar. Like Lucia Ladanza, one of his spiritual daughters, who travelled from Pietrelcina to San Giovanni Rotondo to spend Holy Christmas with her illustrious compatriot. In a page of her diary dated December 24, 1922, Lucia writes, “The friars had brought a large brazier into the sacristy, and many people had gathered around it to keep warm. We were reciting the Rosary as we waited for Mass. Padre Pio prayed right in the middle of all of us. Suddenly, in a halo of light, I saw the Baby Jesus appear in his arms. The face of the Padre was transfigured, his eyes turned towards that figure of light that he held in his arms, his arms open in a surprised smile. When the vision vanished, the Padre realized, from the way that I was looking at him, that I had seen everything. He came up to me and told me not to say anything to anyone.” (Read more.)

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The Crèche at Greccio

From Historical Fiction Research:

On Christmas Eve, when it grew dark, the friars and the townspeople formed an extraordinary candlelit procession, which wound its way slowly up the hill toward the little stable.  As Adrian House says in his biography of Francis, Francis of Assisi:  A Revolutionary Life, "The night seemed to light up like day and the woods on the hillside rang with the joy of the singing."

Once everyone was gathered around, a mass was said near the manger.  (It is sometimes said that shepherds and their flocks gathered around the edges of the crowd, but if so, there must have been some confused and sleepy sheep.)

Francis acted as deacon for the mass.  He sang the gospel and he preached on the meaning of Christmas.  It is said that he even imitated the voices of the animals as he told the Christmas story. (Read entire post.)

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Rudy was Right!

 From Tierney's Real News:

I predicted in 2019 that everything Rudy Giuliani said about the swamp, the laptop, Russia Russia and election fraud was true and would eventually be proven true and that Rudy was the brains behind RICO that would be used to take down all the coup plotters. My hope back then was that Rudy would use RICO to take down the entire Deep State - just like he used it to take down the 5 families of the New York mafia. I still hope that.

Trump confirmed that Rudy is a hero and was right about everything.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Rudy Giuliani is the greatest mayor in the history of New York. They treated him very, very unfairly. All of the things that have come out over the last couple of months through Tulsi and through all of the people, Kash, everybody...All these things have proven that Rudy is 100% correct. Rudy was 100% correct. We all love him.”

RUDY GIULIANI: “Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you. The depth and depravity of these people is only known to those of us who have been tortured by them. The President is absolutely correct about every single thing that I have brought out has turned out to be true. So, Mr. President, thank you. And I do think the judgement of history is the one I’m willing to take, and I think you are too. And you’re doing a great job of fixing it. But I thought that was really beautiful.”

Georgia just admitted that 315,000 votes were illegal in the 2020 election in Fulton County (Atlanta) - a swing state the Biden allegedly “won” by only 11,779 votes.

They destroyed Rudy because he was right about Georgia and now he has been proven right!

Republicans are demanding full restitution for Rudy Giuliani, who was charged with 13 felony counts and fined $148 million after contesting Georgia’s 2020 election. Fulton County, Georgia just admitted that Rudy was right - 315,000 votes were fraudulently counted in Georgia in 2020. (Read more.)

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The Ancient Roots of Christmas Ghost Stories

From The Spectator:

Christmas in its traditional sense is the Christmas season – not the period from mid-August to Christmas Eve when shops are selling tinsel and mince pies, but the Twelve Days of Christmas that begin at sundown on Christmas Eve and culminate in ‘Twelfth Night’ on the evening of 5 January. The medieval 12 nights were the ultimate stand of light and warmth against cold and darkness in the depths of Europe’s Little Ice Age. Small wonder, then, that this strange time of the year gave rise to cathartic tales of the dark, death and the macabre. The nineteenth century writer Montague Rhodes James – who used to read a chilling ghost story yearly at to a select gathering of students and fellows at King’s College – described it as the desire to be made ‘pleasantly uncomfortable’. Tales of supernatural horror, when you yourself are in perfect safety, are perhaps as old as human storytelling itself. 

In a famous story recorded by Bede, the seventh-century missionary St Paulinus converted King Edwin of Northumbria by asking Edwin to imagine human life like a sparrow that flies into the king’s hall in midwinter, and for a brief moment enjoys the light and warmth of the festivities before flying again into the freezing dark:  ‘So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. If, therefore, this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed’, the king declared.  

And the Anglo-Saxon fear of winter is memorably evoked in Beowulf, a poem about the horrors that stalk the midwinter night:  

Long was the season:
Twelve-winters’ time torture suffered
The friend of the Scyldings, every affliction…  long against Hrothgar
Grendel struggled – his grudges he cherished,
Murderous malice, many a winter, 
Strife unremitting…

Grendel is not, of course, a ghost – exactly what he is remains somewhat unclear – but he is an ill-favoured otherworldly visitant. The feeling that Christmas represents a struggle of light against darkness resonates, of course, with the Gospel reading for Christmas night, John 1: ‘The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not’. Some have linked the appearance of ghosts on Christmas Eve to the holiness of the day to follow, as if it is a last chance for dark forces to come out and play before being driven away by the light.  

Christmas has long been associated with strange upheavals in nature; animals are supposed to gain the power of speech at midnight on Christmas Eve, as the entirety of nature is transformed in wonderment at the birth of Christ. As the Gaudete carol has it, Deus homo factus est, natura mirante – ‘God is made man, with all nature marvelling at it’. 

But this does not seem to be enough to explain why the dead should return at Christmas time. On a basic level, we all know that grief for our loved ones is heightened at Christmas, simply because it is that time of the year when families are reunited. In the Middle Ages many people believed that there was a chance for the souls of the dead to return from Purgatory at the turning of the year in order to ask for prayers in the coming year.  

Besides Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the most famous seasonal ghost story is surely the ‘sad tale… of sprites and goblins’ started but left unfinished by the boy Mamillius in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. ‘There was a man dwelt by a churchyard…’ In those eight words we have the essence of the medieval and early modern midwinter ghost story: the setting is the churchyard, not because churchyards are spooky (a modern idea), but because the churchyard is the resting place of the dead.

Mamillius’s story is not, first and foremost, a frightening tale but a sad one – for the souls of the dead have returned to demand the mercy of the living through the offering of prayers and masses, not to scare them.  The Christmas ghost story cathartically exorcises our fear of the spirits of the outer darkness, like Grendel – but it is also a mechanism for managing our collective grief at the loss of the departed, and a reminder to offer them their due. In this context, the morally insistent ghosts of A Christmas Carol are perhaps not as untraditional as they might at first seem. 

The Christmas ghost story is far more than just a spooky bolt-on to the festive season, an antidote to tinsel and relentless good cheer. It is more than a comfortable scare. The Christmas ghost story arises from the deepest roots of the midwinter season as a time of turning, transformation and new beginnings.  Midwinter is a time of encounter with the dead; when we are reminded of their presence alongside us in our revels. The Christmas ghost stories of literature – and now TV – continue, in culturally sanitised form, an age-old and complex negotiation between light and dark, death and life, that becomes acute as the dark encroaches and daylight dwindles. (Read more.)

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What Is Figgy Pudding?

From NPR:

This holiday season, one popular Christmas carol has been raising some questions here at NPR headquarters. Namely: "Oh, bring us some figgy pudding, oh, bring us some figgy pudding, oh — "

Wait. What is figgy pudding? First of all, it's "absolutely delicious," says Debbie Waugh, who recently served the dish at a tea at the Historic Green Spring House in Alexandria, Va.

Figgy pudding — also known as plum pudding or Christmas pudding — is a staple of the British Christmas table, she says. "It resembles something like a cannonball, and it maybe feels a bit like a cannonball when it hits your stomach, but it's tradition and we love it," Waugh tells NPR's Michel Martin. And despite its moniker, the dessert features neither figs nor plums. (Read more.)

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Who Ordered the Hits?

 From Tierney's Real News:

The Democrats (Communists) just showed me who murdered Charlie Kirk of TPUSA and Ella Cook of the College Republicans at Brown University. They can’t help themselves. They love to brag. Forget all the noise and distractions and rabbit holes and focus on the MOTIVE and you’ll see clearly what’s going on.

This newsletter covers a wealth of material in a 10 minute read - and connects lots of dots - so it’s complicated. But, I guarantee you won’t find my educated conclusions anywhere else. Just one week after Ella Cook, the VP of the College Republicans (CRA) at Brown University was murdered, and just three months after Charlie Kirk of TPUSA was murdered at the Utah Valley University campus, Democrats announced that they had formed a NEW organization to compete with TPUSA and the CRA on college campuses - to reach young voters so that Democrats can win mid-term elections! How timely and convenient! Hmm. So first someone needed to murder Charlie Kirk and Ella Cook to get those two strong young Republican leaders out of the way so that Democrats could make this happen? Who thinks that’s a coincidence? Not me.

The DNC announced their new “youth initiative” called NATIONAL YOUTH COORDINATED TABLE (NYCT) exclusively on Newsweek on Thursday, December 18, 2025 in an interview with Democrat New York State Senator James Skoufis, who wants desperately to be the new head of the DNC. Remember that date. (Read more.)

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When Massachusetts Banned Christmas

 It was banned in England, too, under Cromwell. From History:

After the Puritans in England overthrew King Charles I in 1647, among their first items of business after chopping off the monarch’s head was to ban Christmas. Parliament decreed that December 25 should instead be a day of “fasting and humiliation” for Englishmen to account for their sins. The Puritans of New England eventually followed the lead of those in old England, and in 1659 the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony made it a criminal offense to publicly celebrate the holiday and declared that “whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way” was subject to a 5-shilling fine.

Why did the Puritans loathe Christmas? Stephen Nissenbaum, author of The Battle for Christmas, says it was partly because of theology and partly because of the rowdy celebrations that marked the holiday in the 1600s. n their strict interpretation of the Bible, the Puritans noted that there was no scriptural basis for commemorating Christmas. “The Puritans tried to run a society in which legislation would not violate anything that the Bible said, and nowhere in the Bible is there a mention of celebrating the Nativity,” Nissenbaum says. The Puritans noted that scriptures did not mention a season, let alone a single day, that marked the birth of Jesus. 

 Even worse for the Puritans were the pagan roots of Christmas. Not until the fourth century A.D. did the church in Rome ordain the celebration of the Nativity on December 25, and that was done by co-opting existing pagan celebrations such as Saturnalia, an ancient Roman holiday of lights marked with drinking and feasting that coincided with the winter solstice. The noted Puritan minister Increase Mather wrote that Christmas occurred on December 25 not because “Christ was born in that month, but because the heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those pagan holidays metamorphosed into Christian [ones].” According to Nissenbaum, “Puritans believed Christmas was basically just a pagan custom that the Catholics took over without any biblical basis for it. The holiday had everything to do with the time of year, the solstice and Saturnalia and nothing to do with Christianity.” (Read more.)

 

Cromwell and Christmas, HERE.

Here is a defense of the traditional date of Christmas:

The Catholic Church, from at least the second century, has claimed that Christ was born on December 25. However, it is commonly alleged that our Lord Jesus Christ was not born on December 25. For the sake of simplicity, let us set out the usual objections to the date of December 25 and counter each of them.

Objection 1: December 25 was chosen in order to replace the pagan Roman festival of Saturnalia. Saturnalia was a popular winter festival and so the Catholic Church prudently substituted Christmas in its place.

 

Reply to Objection 1: Saturnalia commemorated the winter solstice. Yet the winter solstice falls on December 22. It is true that Saturnalia celebrations began as early as December 17 and extended till December 23. Still, the dates don’t match up.

 

Objection 2: December 25 was chosen to replace the pagan Roman holiday Natalis Solis Invicti which means “Birthday of the Unconquered Sun.”

 

Reply to Objection 2: Let us examine first the cult of the Unconquered Sun. The Emperor Aurelian introduced the cult of the Sol Invictus or Unconquered Sunto Rome in A.D. 274. Aurelian found political traction with this cult, because his own name Aurelianderives from the Latin word aurora denoting “sunrise.” Coins reveal that Emperor Aurelian called himself the Pontifex Solis or Pontiff of the Sun. Thus, Aurelian simply accommodated a generic solar cult and identified his name with it at the end of the third century.

 

Most importantly, there is no historical record for a celebration Natalis Sol Invictus on December 25 prior to A.D. 354. Within an illuminated manuscript for the year A.D. 354, there is an entry for December 25 reading “N INVICTI CM XXX.”  Here N means “nativity.” INVICTI means “of the Unconquered.” CM signifies “circenses missus” or “games ordered.” The Roman numeral XXX equals thirty. Thus, the inscription means that thirty games were order for the nativity of the Unconquered for December 25th. Note that the word “sun” is not present. Moreover, the very same codex also lists “natus Christus in Betleem Iudeae” for the day of December 25. The phrase is translated as “birth of Christ in Bethlehem of Judea.”[i]

 

The date of December 25th only became the “Birthday of the Unconquered Sun” under the Emperor Julian the Apostate. Julian the Apostate had been a Christian but who had apostatized and returned to Roman paganism. History reveals that it was the hateful former Christian Emperor that erected a pagan holiday on December 25. Think about that for a moment. What was he trying to replace?

These historical facts reveal that the Unconquered Sun was not likely a popular deity in the Roman Empire. The Roman people did not need to be weaned off of a so-called ancient holiday. Moreover, the tradition of a December 25th celebration does not find a place on the Roman calendar until after the Christianization of Rome. The “Birthday of the Unconquered Sun” holiday was scarcely traditional and hardly popular. Saturnalia (mentioned above) was much more popular, traditional, and fun. It seems, rather, that Julian the Apostate had attempted to introduce a pagan holiday in order to replace the Christian one! (Read more.)

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