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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.
Denne historien er fra December 11-18, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Denne historien er fra December 11-18, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
