A Christmas Message

This is from the “Federalist Patriot” and it is their Christmas edition. I thought it says better than any Christmas message I can put together,,,,,JF



THE GOOD NEWS
"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." —John 1:14 (NKJV)




"Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid. Then the angel said to them, 'Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.' And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying: 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men!"' —Luke 2:8-14 (NKJV)

IChThUS IMPRIMIS
"More than 2,000 years ago...mankind received its Savior, and to those who had dwelled in darkness, the light of hope had come. Each Christmas, we celebrate that first coming anew, and we rejoice in the knowledge that the God who came to Earth that night in Bethlehem is with us still and will remain with us forever. Christmas is a season of hope and joy, a time to give thanks for the blessing of Christ's birth and for the blessings that surround us every day of the year.... [This] Christmas, we pray [especially] for freedom, justice and peace on Earth. We remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country and for our freedom, and we ask for God's blessing on their loved ones. We ask God to watch over all of our men and women in uniform. Many are serving in distant lands, helping to advance the cause of freedom and peace. Our entire Nation is grateful to them and prays for their safe return. Laura and I send our best wishes for a blessed and merry Christmas." —President George W. Bush

"Christmas is a season of hope and joy, a time to give thanks for the blessing of Christ's birth..." —President Bush

INSIGHT
"He rules the world with truth and grace." —Isaac Watts

"I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year." —Charles Dickens

"The Incarnation...illuminates and orders all other phenomena, explains both our laughter and our logic, our fear of the dead and our knowledge that it is somehow good to die, and which at one stroke covers what multitudes of separate theories will hardly cover for us if this is rejected." —C.S. Lewis

"Regarding not the day, let us give God thanks for the gift of His dear Son... If it be possible to honor Christ in the giving of gifts, I cannot see how while the gift, giver and recipient are all in the spirit of the world... [B]ut we have a Christ gift the entire year." —Charles Spurgeon

"The concerted effort to minimize Christmas has resulted in it being our national Happy Holiday holiday. The Christmas season is now the holiday season. Christmas parties are now holiday parties. Christmas is a time for giving and receiving presents and in many homes, nothing more. Who is this fellow, Jesus Christ, anyway?" —Lyn Nofziger

"Holiday and Holy Day, Christmas is more than a yule log, holly or tree. It is more than natural good cheer and the giving of gifts. Christmas is even more than the feast of the home and of children, the feast of love and friendship. It is more than all of these together. Christmas is Christ, the Christ of justice and charity, of freedom and peace." —Francis Cardinal Spellman

"The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic; it was not a place of myths allegorized or dissected or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true." —G.K. Chesterton

"More than any gift or toy, ornament of tree, let us resolve that this Christmas shall be, like that first Christmas, a celebration of interior treasures." —Ronald Reagan

"He rules the world with truth and grace..." —Isaac Watts


CHRISTMAS 2005—THE PERFECT GIFT
"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning." —James 1:17

Christmas, 2005, comes at a markedly inauspicious time for celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace. Our country has entered the fourth year of a strange, shadowy global war, and, despite battlefield successes that portend ultimate victory, our nation's political leaders are warring over the war here at home: how best to wage it, and whether to treat it as a military conflict or as a courtroom battle. Also on the home front, we are warring over Christmas itself. Added to the common complaints of crass commercialism, the frenzied dashes through shopping malls, and the fast-clicking through e-commerce websites are sharp-edged debates this year over commercial establishments following government schools and public venues in banishing Christmas. This is stunning hypocrisy to say the least, with large-scale sellers coveting Christmas shoppers' business while simultaneously signaling their greater fealty toward the multicultural secularism of the liberal elite.

Practical-minded shoppers tend to dismiss such contentiousness, returning to their search for "the perfect gift," but has anyone ever purchased such a thing? We know there cannot be true perfection in this world, as all the warring amply attests. Instead, gift-givers are seeking something that is well suited to the intended recipient—something that perhaps will even delight the receiver. Who can gainsay a giver's motives?

Undeniably, Nativity accounts treat giving as an important part of the Holy Birth. Historically, the actual year of Christ's birth is thought to be between 6 B.C. and 4 B.C., at the end of Herod's reign in Judea. The first mention of Christmas as a formal Nativity feast occurred in a Roman almanac dated A.D. 336.

"The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light..." —Isaiah

The Christmas star that guided the Wise Men to Bethlehem may have been any of a number of recorded astronomical events coinciding with the likeliest dates of that first Christmas. Halley's Comet appeared in 12 B.C., and ancient Chinese texts note "exploding" stars, or novas, observed in both 4 and 5 B.C. Exceptionally bright planetary conjunctions occurred in 2, 6, and 7 B.C.; among these, the most promising candidate for the Holy Star was the triple conjunction of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in 6 B.C. The Wise Men followed the Holy Star to lay gifts, symbolic of His life, before the Baby Jesus: gold, because He was a king; frankincense, as he was a divine king; myrrh, to foreshadow that His suffering and death would be our preservation.

The prophet Isaiah wrote of the coming Messiah, "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light..." Well before the birth of Jesus, man longed for light in the days of greatest darkness. Early Christians selected December 25th for the Nativity feast to proclaim that Jesus Christ was the real Light of the World, the true "Son of Righteousness," the foretold Messiah. As Jesus later said, he had not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them, just as He fulfilled the deepest longings of human minds and hearts.

The Christ Child was Himself referred to as a Gift—given by Our Heavenly Father to redeem sinful humans. The Holy Birth involved the Incarnation first; the spiritual wrapped in material form—holy, eternal God, enshrined in perishable human flesh. Such was our Perfect Gift, for restoration of full fellowship between God and humans.
God, in His mercy, has bestowed many gifts on this blessed land.
God, in His mercy, has bestowed other gifts—and many on this blessed land. We consider many Decembers, reasserting hope during dark days, as heavenly gifts to America, coming at critical junctures in our nation's Founding. On December 11, 1620, prior to disembarking at Plymouth Rock, the voyagers signed the "Mayflower Compact," often cited as America's original document of civil government and the first to introduce self-government. On December 16, 1773, the "Sons of Liberty" tossed chests of tea from British ships into Boston harbor in protest of Britain's unjust taxes. This, of course, was the Boston Tea Party.

Our American Christmas heritage as celebrated during early colonial days (and continuing today) derives, like so much else here, from the mingled Christmas traditions of immigrants from many lands, with differing religious beliefs and customs of worship and celebration. Our name for this Holy Day arises from the old English Cristes Maesse, or Christ's Mass. As the name suggests, the holiday was first observed in Early America among the Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Moravians who settled predominantly in the Middle Atlantic colonies and the South. Influenced by Puritanism and Calvinism, the New England Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists treated the new celebration with greater circumspection.

In fact, New England colonial authorities outlawed Christmas from 1649 until 1658—and the General Court of Massachusetts in 1659 set a fine of five shillings per offense, punishing the observance "of any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forebearing of labour, feasting, or any such way." Contemporaneously, the Assembly of Connecticut forbade the reading of the Book of Common Prayer, the keeping of Christmas and saints days, the making of mince pies, the playing of cards, or performing on any musical instruments.

National acknowledgement of Christmas returned during the Revolutionary War, and mirrored its ebb and flow. The so-called Christmas Campaign victories of General George Washington in 1776 at Trenton and Princeton were followed a year later by the Revolutionary Army's retreat to Valley Forge, the trail marked by bloody footprints in the snow. Washington wrote in discouragement of "A character to lose—an estate to forfeit—the inestimable blessing of liberty at stake—and a life devoted, must be my excuse," and about how "it was much easier to draw up remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fire-side, than to occupy a cold bleak hill, and sleep under frost and snow, without clothes or blankets."

Massachusetts was the first state to make Christmas a legal holiday, in 1856. By that time, most of our shared Christmas traditions were set, and Harper's Weekly, on January 3, 1863, featured a drawing of encamped soldiers receiving Christmas gifts from home. Christmas become a federal holiday under President Ulysses S. Grant's 1870 declaration.

Nearly all Americans celebrate Christmas today in some way, a uniformity that belies the variance with which, as in colonial days, Americans approach this holiday. The Babe of Bethlehem's birth was announced by angels saying, "Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord... Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men!" Is the Christ Child's American birthday still that universal? Indeed! His earthly arrival brings true delight to believers—but perfection for doubters and deniers too. "O come let us adore him" is neither threat nor coercion, but instead a personal invitation. It is in the nature of a gift to be freely given, and freely received, for true gifts are not forced in either way. As George Washington acknowledged, in his despair in 1777, another gift God has bestowed upon Americans is "the inestimable blessing of liberty." Indeed, the first freedom enshrined in the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights is religious liberty—including the liberty to honor Christmas freely and publicly. Our troops in harm's way, surely, are fighting for Christmas in that very sense—so that we all may freely proffer adoration for that miraculous and perfect Gift of the first Christmas.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: Regarding our Christmas edition (as with our Easter and Thanksgiving editions), we take leave from the rigors of research and analysis of contemporaneous news, policy and opinion in order to focus on an eternal message, indeed a Christian message. To our Patriot readers of faiths other than Christianity, we hope this edition serves to deepen your understanding of our faith—the faith of our Founders, the faith upon which our nation's Declaration and Constitution were conceived.

If you're able, please support The Patriot today by making a contribution, however large or small, to The Patriot's 2005 Annual Fund. If you prefer to support us by mail, please use our Donor Support Form.

We will publish a year-end note next Tuesday followed by the first edition of 2006 (Patriot Chronicle No. 06-01) on Wednesday, 4 January. Until then, a blessed and peaceful Christmas to you and yours.

(Please pray on this day, and every day, for our Patriot Armed Forces standing in harm's way around the world in defense of our liberty, and for the families awaiting their safe return.)

*PUBLIUS*

The Federalist Patriot (FederalistPatriot.US) is protected speech pursuant to the "inalienable rights" of all men, and the First (and Second) Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

In God we trust.

2005 © Publius Press, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

A quick addition:

Last week, the House of Representatives passed a resolution to protect the symbols and traditions of Christmas. The vote was 401-22 in favor of the resolution (5 voted "present"); below are the representatives that voted "nay."

Gary Ackerman (D-NY)

Earl Blumenauer (D-OR)

Lois Capps (D-CA)

Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO)

Diana DeGette (D-CO)

Jane Harman (D-CA)

Alcee Hastings (D-FL)

Michael Honda (D-CA)

Barbara Lee (D-CA)

John Lewis (D-GA)

Jim McDermott (D-WA)

George Miller (D-CA)

Gwen Moore (D-WI)

James Moran (D-VA)

Donald Payne (D-NJ)

Bobby Rush (D-IL)

Janice Schakowsky (D-IL)

Bobby Scott (D-VA)

Fortney Stark (D-CA)

Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL)

Robert Wexler (D-FL)

Lynn Woolsey (D-CA)

Notice any common thread among them? Remember this when you vote in the next election,,,JF