Theologian's Almanac for Week of December 25, 2022

December 25 is Christmas Day. The Christ Mass was first celebrated in 336, and there are two prevailing theories as to how the date was established. The first is that the goal was to associate Christ’s birth with the winter solstice and the “return of the light”; and the second is that the goal was to coordinate Christmas with the Annunciation, the visit during which Gabriel informs Mary that she will conceive. The feast of the Annunciation was traditionally celebrated at the spring equinox, around March 25, nine months before December 25.

Many American Christmas traditions today come from a particular set of events in nineteenth-century England. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, British workers were uprooting from rural areas and relocating to cities, and many became nostalgic about the holidays of their youth in the countryside. In the cities, Christmas revelry was increasingly frowned upon as a cause of excessive drinking and violence, but an appetite began to grow for a revival of older rural customs to mark the season: fireside carols, games, rustic decorations (like a pine tree!), dancing, feasting, and so on. The American writer (and Anglophile) Washington Irving wrote a handful of popular stories explicitly promoting such customs, and Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella, “A Christmas Carol” — which he considered both a critique of industrial capitalism and a romantic celebration of the cozy country holiday he recalled from his childhood — became a beloved, influential classic.

December 25 is also the day St. Francis of Assisi created the first Nativity scene, in Greccio, Italy, in 1223. Francis had recently completed a trip to the Holy Land, and was inspired by his visit to Bethlehem. He wanted to create a way to honor Jesus’ birth that would be vivid, engaging, and participatory for the villagers of Greccio, drawing on the success of the “Mystery” and “Miracle” plays popular in those days. After securing the blessing of Pope Honorius II, Francis recruited villagers to play Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus, along with some live animals to fill out the scene — which he staged in a cave just outside Greccio. Crowds came from miles around, the idea caught on — and within a century, churches everywhere were expected to have some version of a Nativity scene at Christmastime.

December 25 is also the birthday of Clara Barton, born in Oxford, Massachusetts, in 1821. When the Civil War broke out, Barton was working in Washington, D.C., and she began tending to wounded soldiers brought to the city. She grew concerned that soldiers were losing too much blood in transit to the hospital, and so she pioneered the practice of treating the wounded on the battlefield itself. She went on to found the American Red Cross.

December 25 is also the day in 1956 that novelist Harper Lee received a gift that changed her life. Lee was then a struggling writer: working as a ticket agent for an airline, writing on weekends, but not publishing anything. But her friends believed in her — and on that Christmas in New York City, her friends Michael and Joy Brown told her to check the tree for her present. Nestled in the branches was an envelope addressed to her; inside, the message read: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” Lee first thought it was a joke, and when she realized the Browns were serious, she protested — to no avail. They were convinced that she was talented and deserved an opportunity to write full-time. That year of writing resulted in To Kill a Mockingbird — which has gone on to sell tens of millions of copies, inspire a film and a hit Broadway play, and become one of the most beloved works of American literature. Merry Christmas!

December 26 is the first day of Kwanzaa, an African-American and pan-African cultural holiday first celebrated in 1966. The name “Kwanzaa” derives from a Swahili phrase meaning “first fruits.” Graduate student Maulana Karenga was looking for a way to honor the rich and varied heritage largely erased by the brutal history of enslavement. As he put it, he wanted “to give blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and their history rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.” Today, Kwanzaa is a weeklong celebration of African culture and unity. Though it began in the United States, it’s now celebrated in Africa, the Caribbean, South America (particularly in Brazil), and in African immigrant communities throughout Europe, among other places.

December 27 is the birthday of astronomer Johannes Kepler, born in Germany in 1571. Kepler was one of the earliest defenders (and modernizers) of Copernicus’ revolutionary idea that the Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun, rather than the everything revolving around the Earth.

Kepler’s motivations were both scientific and profoundly theological. He one wrote, “Those laws [of nature] are within the grasp of the human mind; God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.” And again: “The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.”

December 27 is also the day in 1831 that Charles Darwin set sail from England on the HMS Beagle. Darwin had originally planned to go into pastoral ministry (many pastors devoted significant portions of their time to natural history), but when one of his biology professors urged him to serve as the naturalist on a voyage to South America (including the Galapagos Islands), he jumped at the chance — over the strenuous objections of his father. Upon his return, Darwin pored over his notes, and eventually developed his theory of evolution through natural selection. His world-changing book on the subject, On the Origin of Species (1859), concludes this way: “Probably all organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed. There is grandeur in this view of life that…from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

December 28 is the day in 1895 that Auguste and Louis Lumière held the first commercial movie screening a series of ten (very) short films shown at the Grand Café in Paris, starting with “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory” (you can watch it here). The film is 46 seconds long, depicting a bustling crowd of workers spilling out onto the street. So began one of the most influential and lucrative popular forms of art in human history.

December 29 is the anniversary of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, where United States federal troops killed almost 300 Lakota men, women, and children. One of the survivors was Black Elk, the famous medicine man, who was 27 years old at the time of the massacre. He wrote: “I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there.” And without diminishing the loss on that day, modern scholars and indigenous activists have sought to counter the narrative that the Lakota people, and Native American people more generally, were completely erased by those brutal events; on the contrary, indigenous Americans have survived and thrived ever since. For this perspective, check out David Treuer’s recent book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present.

December 30 is the day in 1924 when astronomer Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of other galaxies beyond the Milky Way. At the time (not even one hundred years ago!), it was common knowledge that the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the universe. As a young astronomer, Hubble joined the team at the Mount Wilson observatory in California just as his new colleagues unveiled the new, 100-inch Hooker Telescope. Hubble decided to study nebula (glowing clouds of gas) — but as he looked at the Andromeda Nebula through the Hooker Telescope, he realized there were stars inside the nebula, and that one of those stars was a Cepheid variable: a particular kind of pulsating star. Previously, a Harvard astronomer named Henrietta Leavitt had discovered that, by measuring a Cepheid variable star’s brightness and rate of pulsation, it was possible to calculate a star’s distance from Earth. And when Hubble did exactly that, the result was jaw-dropping. The calculations indicated that star was nearly a million light years away (we now know it’s more like two million). This was no nearby nebula. This was a galaxy far, far away. And today, thanks to the telescope named after Hubble, we know that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe!

December 31 is the birthday of the painter Henri Matisse, born in France in 1869. As a young adult just out of law school, as he was struggling with appendicitis, his mother gave him a box of paints — and he was overcome with a powerful sense of vocation. As he later put it: “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.”

Toward the end of his life, Matisse wrote: “There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”