Category: Christmas

Christmas isn’t just a matter of the baby Jesus being born in Bethlehem. It all starts long before that.

In the beginning God caused the universe to be created

Now we don’t want to get into a debate about the Bible versus science. This is really a non-issue. Science researches and reveals the mechanisms by which things happen but not why. God created the universe as an act of will. That’s the point. The time frame and the how is interesting but not central.

In the vastness of this universe our solar system including our planet came into being and became populated by living organisms including humans. Again the time frame isn’t important in the context of this article. Humans are unique in that all creation, certainly as far as we know. In what way? We were created with the potential to become like God himself, God caused us to have; the ability of abstract reasoning,  a perception of right and wrong, freewill to choose and, most of all, what we call a soul, the essence of what we are existing beyond our physical being.

That’s where the problems started. Rather than following God’s plan, human beings began to use their freewill to go their own way, to choose the ‘wrong’.

Now God hadn’t created us as some sort of celestial experiment. He was heavily invested in us and desperately wanted and continues to want us succeed and to ultimately become like Him. Throughout history God intervened numerous ways (these can all be found in the Old Testament section of the Bible) but they all ultimately failed and humanity continued on its course of self destruction.  So finally God decided to do the job himself.

This is where Jesus comes in. God became Emmanuel, which means: ‘God with us’  in the form of a baby born the a poor couple in an obscure town in the tiny corner of the Roman Empire.

He did this for two reasons (1) to live as a human being to demonstrate how we should live our lives (2) to rebuild the bridge back to God so that we could get across the gulf we’d created.

But that’s all a later chapter

The whole initiative is summed up in one of the best know passages in the whole Bible:

God so loved the world that He sent His one and only son that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but attain eternal life’.

You may be sad, you may feel lonely, you may just feel exhausted.

Sit back and listen to this beautiful song. It needs no explanation

Somewhere In Your Silent Night – Loulita Gil – Worship – Barnabas+ (barnabasplus.tv)

Time is running out! Have you written all your Christmas cards? Decided who you are buying present for this year and what? What are the children and/or grandchildren into now? Where are those Christmas lights and why are they all tangled up again?

Of course the Christmas experience can be very different depending on each ones situation

The quintessential ‘happy family’ Christmas with everything running like clockwork, presents exactly what everyone wanted, excited but well behaved children, fabulous perfectly cooked and presented Christmas lunch, party games and so on is not everyone experience (does anyone actually manage to achieve this level of perfection?). For some, the financial burden of aspiring to this sort of Christmas is too much, for others, memories of Christmas’s past may bring sadness, for yet others, sitting alone with a ready meal watching the King’s Speech may be the extent of their Christmas. Or perhaps, children now live too far away and the best than can be hoped for is a phone call or for the tech savvy maybe Facetime or Zoom?

The thing is, Christmas doesn’t have to be according to what other people think it should be like or to conform to a media generated model. Why not create your own tradition whether it’s around a solitary Christmas or with friends or family? Nor does it have to cost an arm and a leg, however much advertising suggests that a ‘real Christmas’ means an expensive one.

And even if ‘church’ isn’t your thing why not take a break from the busyness and  maybe experience the calm and emotion of a Christian Carol Service, Christingle,  Midnight Communion or Christmas Morning Service?  

Have a look at ‘What’s happening at All Saints’ and maybe join us for Christmas?

This carol is a Christmas favourite and is about a calm and bright silent night, and the wonder of a tender and mild new born child. The words were written in 1816 by a young priest in Austria, Joseph Mohr, not long after the Napoleonic wars had taken their toll.
“The story is that the priest went for a walk before he wrote it, and he looked out over a very quiet, winter-laden town,” says composer/conductor John Conahan, and was inspired to write what originally was a poem.
It was Christmas Eve, 1818, when the now-famous carol was first performed as Stille Nacht Heilige Nacht. Joseph Mohr, the young priest who wrote the lyrics, played the guitar and sang along with Franz Xaver Gruber, the choir director who had written the melody.
An organ builder and repair man working at the church took a copy of the six-verse song to his home village. There, it was picked up and spread by two families of traveling folk singers, who performed around northern Europe. In 1834, the Strasser family performed it for the King of Prussia. In 1839, the Rainer family of singers debuted the carol outside Trinity Church in New York City. 
The composition evolved and was translated into over 300 languages with many different arrangements for various voices and ensembles. It was sung in churches, in town squares, even on the battlefield during World War I, when, during a temporary truce on Christmas Eve, soldiers sang carols from home. By 1914, the carol was known around the world, so was sung at the front simultaneously in French, German and English.
Over the years, the carol has grown in popularity along with some mystery. After the original manuscript was lost some speculated that the music had been written by Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven. In 1994, an original manuscript was found in Mohr’s handwriting, with Gruber named as composer.
The English version of “Silent Night” is typically sung in three verses.

Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright. ‘Round yon Virgin Mother and Child, Holy Infant so tender and mild.  Sleep in heavenly peace, Sleep in heavenly peace.

Silent night, holy night! Shepherds quake at the sight! Glories stream from heaven afar, heavenly hosts sing Alleluia! Christ, the Saviour is born, Christ, the Saviour is born.

Silent night, holy night, Son of God, love’s pure light. Radiant beams from thy holy face, with the dawn of redeeming grace.  Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth, Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth.

25^th December started life as a pagan festival, the Roman celebration of Saturnalia, Instead of working the Romans spent their time gambling, singing, playing music, feasting, socializing and giving each other gifts. Wax taper candles called cerei were common gifts during Saturnalia, to signify light returning after the solstice.  On his conversion to Christianity, the emperor Constantine declared that this festival would henceforth  would be a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.  The first recorded use of 25^th December to celebrate Christ’s birth was in 336 AD. Since then most of  the Western World has retained this date. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the 25^th December is actually Jesus’ birthday.

So where did all our Christmas  traditions come from? Actually many of these come from pre-Christian pagan practices;

Holly – this was sacred to Druids as a plant which withstood winter and had magical powers. Christians adopted holly with the berries symbolising the blood of Christ and the sharp leaves the crown of thorns worn at his crucifixion

Yule log – The custom of burning the Yule Log goes back to, and before, medieval times. It was originally a Nordic tradition. Yule is the name of the old Winter Solstice festivals in Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe, such as Germany. The Yule Log was originally an entire tree, that was carefully chosen and brought into the house with great ceremony. The largest end of the log would be placed into the fire hearth while the rest of the tree stuck out into the room! The log would be lit from the remains of the previous year’s log which had been carefully stored away and slowly fed into the fire through the Twelve Days of Christmas. It was considered important that the re-lighting process was carried out by someone with clean hands. Nowadays, of course, most people have central heating so it is very difficult to burn a tree!

Mistletoe – Mistletoe is a plant that grows on range of trees including willow, apple and oak trees. The tradition of hanging it in the house supposedly goes back to the times of the ancient Druids; however, there’s little evidence that this happened. It is also meant to possess mystical powers which bring good luck to the household and wards off evil spirits. It was also used as a sign of love and friendship in Norse mythology. When the first Christians came to Western Europe, some tried to ban the use of Mistletoe as a decoration in churches, because of some of the old stories about it, but many still continued to use it! York Minster used to hold a special Mistletoe Service in the winter, where wrong doers in the city of York could come and be pardoned. The custom of kissing under Mistletoe comes from England. The earliest recorded date mentioning kissing under the mistletoe is in 1784 in a musical. There was kissing under the mistletoe in the illustrations in the first book version of ‘A Christmas Carol’ published in 1843, and this might have helped to popularise kissing under the mistletoe.

Christmas Tree – Each year at the time of the winter solstice, ancient Egyptians celebrated by decorating their temples and homes with evergreen trees and wreaths. The prosperous plant represented everlasting life, peace, and opulence, which was important because winter was a time when their sun god, Ra, was ill and weak, reports History.com. After the solstice, Ra would slowly start glowing brighter and stronger, and an evergreen’s immortality symbolized the triumph of life over death. The Egyptians weren’t the only ones bringing the plant indoors, though. In Scandinavia, the Vikings believed evergreens were special gifts from Balder, their god of light and peace. And the Druids, an ancient Celtic priesthood said to walk the line between the gods and mankind, started bringing evergreens into the home around the 8th century, AD. Before then, the Druids worshipped oak trees as their idol. But English Benedictine monk St. Boniface, a man who devoted his life to converting pagans, offered the Druids a triangular-shaped balsam fir tree as a symbol of the Trinity, and it went on to replace their beloved oaks. They then used evergreens to adorn their temples as a celebration of life without death, hanging mistletoe sprigs over their doorways and windows to ward off evil spirits of diseases. Though 16th-century German theologian and priest Martin Luther is famed for sparking the Protestant Reformation, he’s also credited with bringing the Christmas tree to Germany and introducing it to Christianity in the way that it’s known today.

It might seem that today’s Christmas celebrations are not much different from pagan festivals. But there is a difference!  Entwined with all the party-going, excesses and shadows of long dead pagan religions  is the  reality that a little over 2000 years ago God, the creator of the universe came among us as a baby – Jesus.  Emmanuel, God with us. A perpetual light in a darkened world