Green Tree and Child Worship

If not in the mad rush to prepare for it, then certainly on Christmas morning, many wonder what the heck Christmas is all about. We are exhausted by our worship at our secular temples, the mega malls, and Christmas Eve Bacchanalias. Facebook bombards us with images of and links to "the true meaning of Christmas". Television has its unctuous ads, shows and news stories.

I like Linus' soliloquy in Merry Christmas Charlie Brown. Even better is just to read the first eighteen verses of the first chapter of the Gospel according to John particularly the first and the start of the fourteenth verse (the zinger): "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And the Word became flesh . . ." Christmas, after all, is not about a birthday as some modern believers have trivialized it. Christmas is about the Incarnation - God becoming human - a baby pooping in a manger, a man enjoying a woman's foot massage, a radical Rabbi writhing in agonizing pain, fighting for breath, then dying on a cross. 

That's what it is all about. But, on this day, I also enjoy re-reading what Donald Culross Peattie wrote in An Almanac for Moderns. Peattie was a naturalist and a botanist and became one of the most widely read nature writers in America. An Almanac for Moderns was first published in 1935 with an entry for each day of the year. Here is what Peattie wrote for December Twenty-Fifth:

"It was Francis of Assisi, I believe, the man who called the wind his brother and the birds his sisters, who gave the world the custom of exhibiting the creche in church, where barn and hay, soft-breathing beasts, flowing breast and hungry babe, shepherd and star are elevated for delight. One who has spent a Christmas in some southern country, where an early Christianity still reigns, will understand how all else that to us means the holy festival is quite lacking there. It was originally, and still sometimes is, no more than a special Mass, scarcely as significant as Assumption, much less so than Easter. Out of the North the barbarian mind, forest born, brought tree worship, whether of fir or holly or yule log. It took mistletoe from the druids, stripped present-giving from New Year (where in Latin lands it still so largely stays) and made of Christmas a children's festival, set to the tune of the beloved joyful carols. It glorified woman and child and the brotherhood of men in a way that the Church in, let us say, the second century, dreamed not on.

"You will search the four Gospels in vain for a hint of the day or the month when Christ was born. December twenty-fifth was already being celebrated in the ancient world as the birthdate of the sun god Mithras, who came out of a rock three days after the darkest of the year. His birth was foretold of a star that shepherds and magi beheld. The ancient Angles had long been wont to hold this day sacred as Modranecht or Mother Night. Thus still do we flout old winter with green tree, and old mortality with child worship."

Today I will share in a Serbian Christmas feast. In that spirit, I greet each and all of you, my readers:

Mir Bozji, Hristos se Rodi! (Peace of God, Christ is born!)

And, yes, let us flout.