.
IN modern Britain, Christmas is about the only time when everyone takes a break. Whatever your faith, it has become one of the great moments of the year, associated with family and festivities, as well as over-indulgence and extravagance. It’s sobering how many families scrimp and save through the year to give their children a ‘good Christmas’.
This is all a long way, of course, from the first Christmas. As recounted in the Gospels, it didn’t take place in a king’s palace, a house or even a hovel. Imagine a young woman, heavily pregnant, in an unfamiliar town in the depths of winter, two millennia ago. Abandoned by everyone but her husband, who isn’t the father of her child, no one will give her a pillow on which to lay her weary head. She has to take refuge in a stable and according to the Gospel of Luke, ‘she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn’.
St Luke’s pithy description of the miserable circumstances of Christ’s birth has always been at the heart of the Christmas story. Perhaps we would perceive it differently today, however, if more than a millennium after the event itself, a quite exceptional individual hadn’t attempted literally to re-create the details of this extraordinary episode as it is related in the Gospels.
In December 1223, a holy man, who had devoted his life to the poor and suffering, was invited to spend Christmas with a friend, who lived in a village he had visited since childhood. The host, anxious to please, asked his guest what he could do to make the festivities truly special. The holy man was St Francis and this was the start of one of our most beloved Christmas rituals.
この記事は Country Life UK の December 11-18, 2019 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は Country Life UK の December 11-18, 2019 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
Happiness in small things
Putting life into perspective and forces of nature in farming
Colour vision
In an eye-baffling arrangement of geometric shapes, a sinister-looking clown and a little girl, Test Card F is one of television’s most enduring images, says Rob Crossan
'Without fever there is no creation'
Three of the top 10 operas performed worldwide are by the emotionally volatile Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, who died a century ago. Henrietta Bredin explains how his colourful life influenced his melodramatic plot lines
The colour revolution
Toxic, dull or fast-fading pigments had long made it tricky for artists to paint verdant scenes, but the 19th century ushered in a viridescent explosion of waterlili
Bullace for you
The distinction between plums, damsons and bullaces is sweetly subtle, boiling down to flavour and aesthetics, but don’t eat the stones, warns John Wright
Lights, camera, action!
Three remarkable country houses, two of which have links to the film industry, the other the setting for a top-class croquet tournament, are anything but ordinary
I was on fire for you, where did you go?
In Iceland, a land with no monks or monkeys, our correspondent attempts to master the art of fishing light’ for Salmo salar, by stroking the creases and dimples of the Midfjardara river like the features of a loved one
Bravery bevond belief
A teenager on his gap year who saved a boy and his father from being savaged by a crocodile is one of a host of heroic acts celebrated in a book to mark the 250th anniversary of the Royal Humane Society, says its author Rupert Uloth
Let's get to the bottom of this
Discovering a well on your property can be viewed as a blessing or a curse, but all's well that ends well, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee, as she examines the benefits of a personal water supply
Sing on, sweet bird
An essential component of our emotional relationship with the landscape, the mellifluous song of a thrush shapes the very foundation of human happiness, notes Mark Cocker, as he takes a closer look at this diverse family of birds