Christmas is almost here, and yesterday I grit my teeth and went to get myself a Christmas tree. So much has been destroyed in our culture - our holidays being a perfect example. And if you want to see obscenity in action, go visit a discount toy store. I still have several memories of wartime Christmas - one being somewhere in a cold and horrid place called Kamenez-Podolsk (not sure about the spelling!) in 1943 where there was not a single present anywhere for any child in sight, and my good Oma stuffed some newspapers into her boots to keep them extra-warm and stomped into a forest. She came back with a fir twig about two feet in length. She put that in a bottle. As darkness fell on Christmas Eve, she said to my little sister and me: "Now be quiet. The Christ Child is walking the earth." And then this woman, whose ancestors had taken German culture to a foreign soil almost two hundred years ago to build magnificent communities of ethnic unity and discipline the Communists destroyed, told her two small, hungry grandkids: "This is how Christmas smells in Germany." With that, she struck a match and put it to that fir twig. The only thing this German woman had to give was a small memory, but to this day, it's there. No power on earth will destroy it. Each year, I take a match and put it to the needles of my Christmas tree, and I say to what's left of my own family: "That is how Christmas smells in Germany." And what do our enemies know of what truly sustains us these days! They don't know the last thing about us! Contrast that with a letter I got from a young man who is only now beginning to take tally of the treasure trove robbed from his kids:
". . . I was driving back from a medieval festival sponsored by a local chapter of the Society of Creative Anachronism and thinking when I got home, I'd tell you about what I witnessed there tonight. For 99.9% of the event it was a pleasant experience. Toward the end, after dinner, a group of talented men and women gathered in the center of the room around which the dinner tables were arranged. They sang Christmas carols for about an hour. It was beautiful. They sang Silent Night in English and then in German and I remembered a story I've heard. I don't know if it's true, but it's a great story. I think it was in WWI, and in the midst of some of the most grueling trench fighting on a Christmas Eve night, supposedly a German infantryman climbed out of the trench and began to sing Silent Night. Everyone ceased fire and joined in with him. I can't remember all of the details, but the beauty, the heart rending beauty of that story is indelibly imprinted in my mind. Well, now we come to the event that I must tell you about. It's such a perfect example of a certain social ill - an ill you know all too well. There were a Jewish couple, a young man and woman there tonight also. With them was another Jewish woman. They got up and walked outside during the caroling. After the caroling, I went to the back playroom (the event took place in a Christian church, in one of the ancillary buildings) to get my 5 year old. On the way back with her, I walked by the Jewish man who had cornered one of the Christian women who had organized the festival. He was complaining about the Christian Christmas carols and seemed angry; in fact I heard him say that he was "...pissed off about this." Apparently he was offended that a group of Christians holding a medieval Christmas festival in a Christian church would sing Christmas songs about Jesus Christ. So, I went on back to the main room to help my wife pack our things up. The two Jewish women had corraled a small group of the carolers in the center and were getting them to sing some song I'd never heard before. Apparently, neither had they, but they were willing to try. Well these two big Jewish women couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, but were belting out this one line, "He shall reign forever." It went on and on and on. That was the only words to this song. I call it a song, but truthfully it had the melody of a rusty bolt being turned. After 3 or 4 minutes of this, the Christian carolers gave up and walked away. . . "
My Oma wouldn't have done that. I don't know what my Oma would have done, but she wouldn't have walked away from that one. Ingrid
Thought for the Day: "A people perishes when it confuses _its_ duty with duty in general. Nothing ruins us more profoundly, more intimately, than every "impersonal" duty, every sacrifice to the Moloch of abstraction." (Friedrich Nietzsche)