Theologian's Almanac for Week of December 24, 2023

December 24 is the anniversary of the “Christmas Eve Truce,” which took place in 1914 along the Western front during World War I. German and British troops had been locked in brutal trench warfare, but on Christmas Eve, sounds of “Stille Nacht” were heard rising from the German side, and some Brits sang back “The First Noel.” Both sides tentatively raised candles and lanterns above the parapets, and the truce began.

The soldiers met between the trenches in “no man’s land,” shaking hands, exchanging small gifts (tobacco, alcohol, chocolate), and even playing impromptu games of soccer. In the early morning of December 26, the men returned to their trenches, picked up their weapons — and hostilities resumed. But to this day, the tales of the truce are still told, story after story from up and down the Western front. Check out SALT’s “Strange New World” podcast episode about this event here.

December 24 is also the anniversary of “Silent Night” first being performed at the Church of St. Nicholas in Oberndorf, Austria, in 1818. The young priest there had written the lyrics as a poem two years earlier, and as Christmas Eve approached, the story goes, the church’s pipe organ fell into disrepair. Desperate to avoid a Christmas Eve Mass without music, the young priest hurriedly asked the choir director to write a tune for the poem, and the two performed the simple song as a duet in the Mass (some say a capella, some say accompanied by a guitar) — to the congregation’s delight. The song became a sensation, and today resounds in some 300 languages around the world.

December 24 is also the anniversary of the famous “Earthrise” photograph, taken by the astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, the first to reach and orbit the moon. As they circled the moon, they had the largest television audience in history — and they decided to read from the Book of Genesis, taking turns as they read the first ten verses: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness...” As the spacecraft orbited around to the dark side of the moon and out of radio contact, they ended the broadcast this way: “We close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless you all — all of you on the good Earth.”

Here’s SALT’s short film, “Earthrise,” made in collaboration with the New York Times. And here’s the NYT essay that went with it, co-written by SALT’s own Matthew Myer Boulton.

December 24 is also the anniversary of the first radio broadcast ever, made by Canadian-born electrician and chemist Reginald Fessenden on the coast of Massachusetts in 1906. He opened the broadcast with a short speech, played “O Holy Night” on his violin, read from the Gospel of Luke, and ended with “Merry Christmas.” Ships out on the Atlantic reported receiving the broadcast from miles away.

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. In all likelihood, over time, both of these factors played a part.

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 widely frowned upon as a cause of excessive drinking and violence, but an appetite began to grow for a revival of older, more wholesome 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 pieces 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 — exactly 800 years ago! 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. Check out SALT’s “Strange New World” podcast episode about this event here.

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, along with a pledge of financial support, 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 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 in those days 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 and continued to dream 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 they 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, Harvard astronomer 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 in the Milky Way galaxy. This was an another galaxy entirely, far, far away. And today, thanks to the telescope named after Hubble (and now the James Webb Telescope), we know that there are no less than hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe! Think of it: in almost exactly 100 years, our understanding of creation went from one galaxy (what Hubble was taught as a student) to hundreds of billions — some recent estimates even the real number may be something like two trillion!