Considering Tradition

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The American Conservative: Considering Tradition

By GRACY OLMSTEAD • December 24, 2014, 12:05 AM

 

Christmas is a holiday resplendent with “tradition.” Many have no connection to history or heritage—but they’re fun, and become memory-laced with time. An example: my mother gets my siblings and me books every Christmas Eve—everything from funny storybooks, to Tolkien’s classic Letters From Father Christmas. We read them aloud to each other around the fire before bed.

 

There are also the religious traditions, ones that meld with awe and wonder to make the holiday both beautiful and holy. Advent, brimming over with both theology and beauty, helps us refocus on the meaning beyond the temporal. It takes the material and makes it transcendent. It turns the simple—candles, words, songs, prayers—into timeless moments. Christmas hymns, sweet and haunting, transform our normal cadences of worship into something new, yet incredibly old: they transform our patterns of praise into timely yet timeless reverence. These are the most important traditions of the Christmas season.

[Draggingtree]

Canada Free Press wishes one and all the Blessed Christmas of a Child; one that will go on from this Christmas keeping the Christmas spirit in your heart all year, and one that will bring you back to next Christmas as the same child.

 

The Christmas Child in All of Us

 

By Judi McLeod December 24, 2014

Even with the pharisee politicians of the day, not much different than the ones who harassed the masses back in the time of the Birth of Christ, working feverishly through all seasons to draw their attention away from it, public attention will focus on Christmas Eve, on the only Star who truly matters; the Star not of material things preening on theatre and television screens, but the Star of Souls.

 

“For unto you is born this day…a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:11), words in all of time, which no others have ever surpassed.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/68536