Happy Christmas · 2:17pm Dec 25th, 2014
Fun fact: It is, frankly, shocking how much you can alter the simple word of Hallelujah to fit your song.
As in actually Christmas this time.
I'll be brief, here's what I got: New Headset (not needed but I like it), a silver Celtic Cross and Necklace, (silver is my favourite metal), a silver bell as a parting gift from my supervisor now that I have finished my contract (came with a neat little red bow) as well as a £250 bonus, £217 of tax rebate from Her Majesty the Queen because apparently I paid too much tax (I am pretty sure someone at Customs and Revenue made a mistake there but I am not about to correct them), new pair of runners (shoes, badly needed), two £20 gift cards for Waterstone's bookstore. For books. And I got a sprained ankle.
Also you'll get the next chapter either next week or the week after, I can't promise I'll be sober by then though.
Meanwhile my family are all sick and bedridden with a 24 hour bug that struck over 40 people at once, but we'll be damned if we let a little thing like biological illness get in the way of Christmas dinner. Oh, and my brother finally got up off of his arse and proposed to his girlfriend of five years. About fucking time. However that does leave me as the sole unmarried son in the household given that my eldest brother is married, housed and with two children, so you know, no pressure or anything, asshole.
Those shenanigans aside, this is actually my favourite time of the year next to the Spring holidays of Easter and St.Patrick's day (both days being not only religious holidays but national ones, St. Patrick's for obvious reasons and Easter because of the Easter Rising commemorations, but I despise St.Patrick's day because of what its become and how 99% of the parades have literally nothing to do with either St.Patrick or Irishness but that's just me being grouchy) there was always s a certain darkness about the holiday I have absolutely adored. A cold, ominous, silent and contemplative darkness that I have always found hard to define, but one I never found threatening and one that, paradoxically, always inspired a shred of joy even in my most maudlin and introspectively spiteful moments, I could never really explain it but there is something very foolishly human about the season.
Which makes no sense of course, there is something human about all seasons, but Christmas especially so. I often remember talking to others about why Christmas was not celebrated on 'little Christmas', known here in Ireland as Nollaig Bheag. It is the 6th of January, when the feast of the Epiphany is held and when Christmas was traditionally celebrated back in the days when we all still used the Julian calender to mark our days. The Eastern Churches still hold to celebrate on this day, but when we shifted to the Gregorian calender so too did the practice of celebrating Christmas, at least in most countries who then held communion with Rome. It amuses me endlessly when people, in ignorance, accuse us of celebrating Winter Solstice under the guise of Christianity, maybe its just because I am Irish and I live in a country that was the textbook example of Christianization of a thoroughly pagan nation but that always struck me as silly. There are so many things we have today that have origins in paganism that have ceased to be pagan and become something else entirely, its as ridiculous as accusing the secular, commercial existence of Christmas as it stands in Iran and Japan of being fundamentally Christian when neither of those countries or people see anything Christian in their practices of it, and in truth there isn't much.
Because when you're converting a nation how else would you go about it? Moving your own holidays onto days ordinarily holy to the people you are trying to convert is exactly how you begin converting them culturally in order to make it last, because it is not enough to merely go soul to soul, (but I shall stop here before I go on a thirty thousand word sociological essay pertaining to the hows and whys and necessity of cultural conversion, the acceptable limits and excesses of syncretism and the importance of bread) anyway, back to Christmas.
“Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.”
- G.K. Chesterton
The tradition of gift giving and generosity is a fundamental part of the holiday and one I fiercely defend even if consumerism makes the holiday start earlier every year and the utter abomination that is Black Friday finally crossing the Atlantic and is now poisoning the hearts and minds of people here when they go shopping. (words cannot express my utter displeasure) and is one that is as old as dirt. St. Nicholas, (heretic slapping badass he was), took it upon himself to regularly go out and give to the poor, although not specifically on Christmas day. The most famous account was throwing a bag of gold through a man's window so that he could afford the dowries of his daughters so they could get married and wouldn't have to face a life of want (that was the fashion in the eastern Roman empire at the time, even poor people expected dowries of some sort. Though the tradition of linking Nicholas up with Christmas didn't start until the middle ages, with a couple of nuns in Italy inspired by his story. They worked night and day to bake a shitton of goods and went about leaving them at the doorsteps of the poor, knocking on the doors and promptly running off before the door opened. It all kinda snowballed from there.
Humble beginnings indeed.
Fun fact: In Ireland, Santa Claus is traditionally depicted wearing brown robes and furs, and is believed to reside in Lapland in Scandinavia, not the North Pole. He only rather recently appears depicted wearing red because of American depictions of him, giving birth to the erroneous but hilarious accusation in Ireland that 'Coca Cola made Santa red in order to sell their drinks.' Even funnier, the modern American depiction of Santa has its origins in the colonial era, when people wanted to continue their Christmas traditions carried over from Europe, but didn't want to upset the Puritanical attitudes of the majority of the population who despised 'superstition' and myth, so they changed Santa Claus to what we are now familiar with in American media when he originally had alot in common with traditional European depictions. Funny how things come full circle, huh?
That being said, some of the traditions surrounding Christmas and Santa in particular are hilarious. Such as the story of the Krampus, this demon St. Nicholas met while traversing mountains in Germany. It differs depending on the story you've heard, but basically Santa kicked the demon's ass and made it an indentured servant, (look up the krampus, that's not something you just challenge to a duel of fisticuffs) but given the source material of the man being ballsy enough to get up in the middle of an ecumenical council (one with the Emperor and God only knows how many guards present) walk down the aisle and slap a bitch for insulting the Virgin Mary, one can see why the legend became what it did. (Interestingly, he did not deck Arius because he was a heretic, half the bishops there supported Arius' theological position afterall and the point of the council was to reconcile and recant one way or another. He punched Arius because he made a crude remark about the Blessed Virgin and not an erroneous theological position. But either way, Arius was a heretic and Santa punched him, so you know, details details)
But the tradition of gift giving and Christmas actually predates Santa, both the mythological and the real one.
In Spain as well as Portugal, they do not have Santa, at least not traditionally. What they have instead are the Three Magi. Also known as the Three Wise Men or the Three Kings, those guys who followed the Star of Bethlehem to find the infant Christ in the manger, who come around to the village/town area and hand out gifts to children and tell traditional tales as well as stories about the nativity and other good stuff.
Basically, what I am saying here is Iberians get three Santa Claus for the price of one. Jelly. I think Latin America and South America have similar traditions but I am not sure, I need to do more research. But the tradition of the Three Wise Men and Christmas has been an old one, a very, very old one throughout Christendom. Except for Ethiopia and Coptic Egypt, but I can't be sure about their traditions, especially the Copts who can rarely afford to be open with their religiosity even in the most innocent of cultural pieties. Because, you know, Egypt.
I suppose it only makes sense on a holiday were God gifted Himself to mortal men.
“Christmas is the day that holds all time together.”
- Alexander Smith
Fun fact: It was a God-awful time trying to find a decent rendition of this song on youtube, do we really need 500 copies of Glee's rendition of the song? Such a shit show.
Beautiful, isn't it?
This perfectly exemplifies by what I mean about the strange darkness of the season. This old carol is triumphant but haunting, fundamentally joyful in its message but no less frightening for it. That shuddering, fearful oppression that causes the heart to pump and the face to smile lest not the frost to freeze your skin.
Fun fact: Good KIng Wincesles was not actually a king, he was, at most, a count. However, he was also a prince given the fashion of calling all lords princes. So you know, close enough.
All the best songs about Christmas, in my opinion, reflect this darkness to one degree or another. A kind of Solemn Joy that should be contradictory but at the same time it is not. It is bold, expectant, giddy and fearful all at once and it is all the more glorious for this apparent nonsense. Even the godawful popular genres of music these days can occasionally get it right.
Fun fact: He would make an awful world president, also Churchill actually fought on the Western Front in world war 1, but given that this song is about an apparent mismash conflict involving Tsars, King James, (Britain and Russia were Allies through France at the time), world war one, cavalry and nuclear bombs, I think we can forgive it for the silly inconsistencies about a war that never was.
But nothing so exemplifies this glorious thing about Christmas than the very war I was just joking about in the previous sentence. The first world war.
I find I have great difficulty expressing how I feel about this tragedy, this sundering of the world. In Ireland's case it was such a strange thing, because it was the war that ruined the chance of the Home Rule bill being passed, ensuring peace in Ireland and proper co-operation between British and Irish parts of the Empire, which birthed the modern Republic, and all the horrors of the Irish Civil war and the Troubles that followed. That is only the localized consequences of this conflict for me and mine, and we are only a small nation, it was the war that forged the twenty first century, broke the powers that be and it, more than any other single factor is the reason why America became the pre-eminent power in the world it is today (yeah no, sorry American readers, but I don't believe in American Exceptionalism, you're a great country with great potential which accomplished many great things even before this point in history, but nothing contributed more to your ascendancy than the fact that all the other major players had their backs broken before 1950), it is what broke Germany and made it possible for that Hitlerite monstrosity to come to power, what broke our connections with our ancient past and made communism and fascism capable of subsuming almost the entire continent.
It was what contributed to the breaking of China into warlords, which eventually saw the rise of the communists there and everything that entailed from that.
It was what broke the Ottoman empire and toppled the last great Caliph of the Islamic faith, the only man capable of holding the Muslim (or at least Sunni) world together at least tangentially and who could rule one way or another or at least oversee philosophical divisions and developments in Islam (and he may have been the only one capable of opposing Wahabiism that has so infected much of the Islamic world.) WWI broke the empire and saw the rise of Ataturk... and the Armenian genocide that followed. It is what made ISIS possible.
Imperialism is to blame for much of what is now the state of the Middle East and Africa, but the sudden breaking of those empires and the careless divvying up of the land made it all so much worse.
It more than anything else caused the horror that was the Balkans war, the Spanish civil war, the rise of the Soviet Union, the second World War and the Cold War which followed with all its attendant horrors. It is impossible to overestimate its significance, it was the Great War, the one that brought out the absolute worst in humanity, where military technology outstripped military thinking by miles at a time, a generation of warrior poets who marched to their deaths needlessly and where chivalry finally died and valour was forgotten. It was where the time ended when one man could make war with his enemy but not necessarily hate him, a war where every effort was made to avoid or obstruct it but it occurred anyway, where all the means and rational might of man fell in the face of the barbarism and unreason we had foolishly thought we had tamed with our civilization.
I had to keep my lips tightly shut this year, this centenary of the beginning of that terrible conflict which is now, literally, the stuff of myth and legend, which now rightfully bears the title of ancient. I had to keep quiet and bear the suffering of fools and demagogues who celebrated the fact that this war happened, who need to tell themselves and others it was truly necessary and right that good men fought good men and died in horror, where good nation fought good nation without true malice to one another and broke to pieces in their fighting. It was difficult but there is nought I can do about it, but remember this one truly miraculous thing.
We tried to stop it, everything and everyone tried to stop it, I read the history of these days and I see desperate men living the shadows of giants trying to prevent an avalanche, it seemed as if nothing really could, especially not when the war started and the Guns of August roared in anger, it would take the very hand of God to put it to stop, a divine intervention was what we needed.
And we got one.
“But, however, looking back on it all, I wouldn’t have missed that unique and weird Christmas Day for anything.”
- Bruce Bairnsfather. Bullets & Billets,
On Christmas Day, 1914, German and British soldiers left their trenches and fraternized on a field of dead men.
Make no mistake, this truce only lasted a few hours and did not happen everywhere, it was an aberration and treated as one by the public.
What you never hear is that is was not the only truce of the war, and it happened every year of the war, sometimes bigger than the first.
But it was no less miraculous and marvellous for its smallness. The audacity and impossibility of hardbitten veteran men who on any other day of the year would gladly murder and slaughter one another, rising from their trenches and singing the same songs in differing languages, utterly uncaring of the discordant tones their various tongues made, it could not be described as anything else other than a miracle. A sign that even then, when blood had been spilt in anger this horror could have been stopped, but officers and prime ministers alike would have none of it, even though king and Kaiser were shocked and shaken when they heard word of it, suddenly unsure of their continuation of the war.
Of course in centuries past, it was not uncommon for armies and emperors to occasionally call for a lull in the fighting for the sake of this holiday. For no other reason than because it was this particular holiday. There is no myth here, it was a very real occurrence, as real as those hundreds of priests who stood in a line between two opposing armies on the front in a mad, desperate attempt to stymie the bleeding wound of Europe.
This year I could've written about any of the stories of that singular horror of a war, any tale of the heroism and the barbarism that it resulted in, in the tragedy upon tragedy that led up to it, I could've recounted on the heroic attempts of Blessed Emperor Karl of Austria to try to desperately put an end to the fighting and of the carving up not only of the empire, but the breaking of Hungary and the ceding of legitimately Hungarian lands to its neighbours for no other reason than to weaken the Magyar part of the empire that wanted peace the most. But I chose not to, instead leaving to myself to revel in what most people consider nothing more than a historical curiosity but for me was the most important and glorious point of that conflict.
That men of war, in a moment of childlike innocence forgot barbarism and remembered civilization. For without material profit they sang, shared drinks and played football amidst the blood and mud of hell. For a modern cause thought so important they fought yet for the ancient cause of a child born into poverty two thousand years past thought so hollow they met as friends and neighbours. For one, shining moment at humanity's worst, we remembered our best.
That is what Christmas means to me, it is literally sacred, for all it is a candle amidst the dark and fury of Winter's chill, the life in the death and the promise of the spring to come.
Nollaig mhaith chugat agus athbhliain faoi mhaise daoibh,
Wanna know funny thing, handy? these blogs could be considered small chapters.
Nice to see someone share the stance that WWI is one of if not the greatest mistake we as a species has ever made.
I just want to say thank you Handy. This actually taught me alot about WWI. As a member of the United States (and a member of our public school system at that) I've only really learned general knowledge, and key facts about that war, sure there were some little things we were told about, like the Christmas truce, but it has never really been talked about like you just did. We never emphasize just how much this war changed the world. You've made me want to research, and learn more about it, so thank you Handy.
~Sam aka Pro Wrestling Pony
2678543 Its not a legitimate academic overview, but the Extra Credits short series on the lead up to the beginning of World War one is a good scene setter and lets you get to know some of the major characters involved and it is probably one of the most unbiased accounts of the lead up to the first world war I have ever encountered.
Which is actually kind of sad when you think about it.
2677759 You think so? It was not my intention.
2678197 It is easily overshadowed by the Second World war's monstrous abominations and the sheer weight of bodycount, or worse, conflated as an unimportant sequel to it rather than the unGodly tragedy it was in its own right.
2678581 while it might not be intentional, some are quite long. Anyway, Merry Christmas and happy new year
I have never heard of such incidents, if I were to be honest. I mean, I always thought it would've happened SOMEWHERE at SOMETIME, but I never realized there was a recorded record of this happening, four, no less. I've never been a religious man (a mix between Christian (Catholic on my dad's side) and dominantly agnostic) but Christmas is definitely one of those holidays. It's like Thanksgiving over here in America, although that's more of an insult than a compliment, but the analogy get's the point through.
I see all these people complaining about how Christmas insults their religion n' such, but quite honestly, who would complain about getting free fucking presents? The real travesty is how Christmas is barely a fucking holiday to be thankful for, it's just a god damn day where you get presents. Sure, there's still some conservative families who respect tradition, but they're few and far between. Agh, a shame.
Rants aside, I never would've guessed ISIS is as big over there as it is over here. Although now that I think about it...
I don't think my family celebrates 'Christmas' in the traditional manner, American or European. Sure, we give gifts...but we also smoke, drink and ingest various herbs and spices while dancing around a fire. Copiously. To be honest, I've never seen a star, a santa, a cross, or a garland of holly in my house since I was eight. But it's nice to hear you celebrate, even if it does scream a bit zealous to me.
It's also pretty rad that you're comfortable talking about religion on the site. Sorry about your brothers though. It seems that winter sickness is especially bad this year.
Merry Christmas either way.
2679200 That actually sounds like some Scandinavian traditions I've heard regarding Christmas, although those involved more deer suits and less strange herbs, but there was a fire involved.
And heh, if you think this is me being zealous, you should see me talk about things going on in the Church, I can get pretty lively during such a discussion.
2678846 ISIS is a huge concern over here, considering Turkey is right on the doorstep of Europe and ISIS is right on the doorstep of Turkey.
2681585 I honestly thought it was a bit more tribal...but okay.
And yeah. Despite the brief theology course I've taken, I can be pretty anti-Abrahamic. I'd prefer to not get into a discussion like that with you, though. On top of you likely knowing more from the origins of certain aspects of the religion you follow, you're a cool guy and I don't want to insult you like that. I'd also like to get to know you better in the future. Can't 'Love and Tolerate' or earn your 'Friendship' if I don't at least fulfill the toleration quota~ L('u')n
2681585 I'd believe that, considering all the hipster punks in London are trying to join ISIS, but man, people over here are in mass hysteria as if ISIS is actually a huge military power - sure, they may be a frightening force to behold, but if you analyze their strategieis n' such, they're nothing more than cowards hiding behind civilians and bandanas. Thing is though, is that people act like ISIS will set a foothold in America, even though they're just a big group of untrained soldiers who probably don't even know how to read, no less operate a boat or a plane.
It's a good the US of A is over the Atlantic instead of being apart of Europe and Asia, otherwise the world would have ended a long time ago. I haven't been reading up on it lately, but I heard they took over some oil fields or something. Terriosm is a wonderful thing, isn't it? Sucks for you guys though, you don't have an entire fucking ocean seperating you from some pissed off face cloth wearing bastards. Highly doubt they'll get too far though. Europe has had two thousand years to master the art of war, and when worst comes to worst they'll come to each other's aid, as seen in history.