FROM Carol Field’s Celebrating Italy (William Morrow and Company, 1990):

“By the middle of December you can smell Christmas in the crisp air, in the chestnuts roasting at street corners, and in the steamy fragrances spilling out the doors of bakeries and restaurants. You can feel it in the sharp drop of temperatures as fountains frost over, leaving tritons and nymphs riding on icicles. You can hear it in the mournful tunes played by the zampognari, Italy’s bagpipers, shepherds who have come down from the Abruzzo mountains dressed in crisscrossed leather leggings that reach up to the knees, shaggy sheepskin vests worn sheared side out, and slouchy felt hats. The keening sounds of their bagpipes and rough rustic flutes swirl eerily through the streets, a melancholy poetry that is as familiar to Rome as Santa’s sleighbells are to an American. The zampognari walk slowly in twos and threes up and down the Via Condotti and the Via della Croce and the other elegant shopping streets below the Spanish Steps, where, starling reminders of the shepherds at the manger in Bethlehem, they play their ancient instruments in front of rich window displays of furs, leathers and silks. The zampognari arrive some days before Christmas, but they used to arrive much earlier and always charged a set rate for a nine-day serenade to the Madonna called a novena. Now they merely hold out their hats and everyone drops in a few coins or bills.”

At the Famous-Barr Department Store, now long gone, in St. Louis

ALAN writes:

This comes under the heading “What Americans Have Surrendered.”

At the St. Louis Public Library, the staff association newsletter of December 1961 tells us:

“That we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year can be plainly seen throughout the Library.  Almost every department has been busy decorating for the holiday season…  …a lovely Madonna card display….Christmas posters in the windows….red and silver candles…”

1966:  Christmas trees are decorated in multiple Library departments.

1967:  “The Christmas tree, trimmed with red and gold satin balls hung from velvet bows and lighted with miniature colored lights….gave a festive air” to the annual Christmas Breakfast, after which staff members sang Christmas carols around the big tree in the Library’s Main Hall.

1968:  “Christmas decorations in the Education Department this year included a crèche lent by” one staff member. “Some of the little wooden houses and figurines were brought from Germany many years ago by his grandfather….   Children visiting the Children’s Room are amazed by the popcorn and cranberry strings on the old-fashioned Christmas tree.”

1969:   “The usual Christmas beauty of red and green, tinsel and holly, candles and bells, and of course a beautiful Christmas tree, were all in readiness” for the 275 people who attended the Christmas breakfast.  “Following tradition, the singing of carols around the huge Christmas tree in the Main Hall made a perfect ending to the breakfast.” Read More »

ISRAEL SHAMIR, a Russian/Israeli writer who advocates the “One Man, One Vote, One State” solution seeking to unite Palestine and Israel in one democratic state, thinks David Friedman, Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel, would bring about positive developments.

So, do not be afraid of bad Mr Friedman. He is likely to do a lot of good. And definitely he can’t make things any worse. Read More »

Snowstorm, Edward Willis Redfield

CHRISTMAS TREES

— Robert Frost

The city had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas. Read More »

An Urban Family, Frank Dicksee

[A revised version of an earlier post.]

ALL of civilization depends on the father. As goes the father, so goes society. When fatherhood as an institution is strong, when a man governs his small commonwealth with a sense of his own place in a hierarchy that extends far beyond the home, order — though never perfect — radiates throughout society.

“Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum,” says Fr. Chad Ripperger, F.S.S.P. “Either the man will be head of the house or the wife will; it is that simple.”

Women rule the world, says the trashy Beyoncé. And in many ways she is right.

But they rule because powerful men have let them and encouraged them to rule as a form of conquest over other men. Feminism is a black operation. Given the natural and inescapable power men have over women, the rule of women can only be a front for the rule of men, which does not mean women are not complicit in its rise. Men will always have power over women. It is only a question of whether men directed to the good will rule them or men directed toward the absence of good.

A man is not in essence superior to a woman. But by the accidental conditions of nature, he has authority over her. All male domestic authority must be founded in love, or it loses its legitimacy.

At his website Sensuus Traditionis, Fr. Ripperger’s essay “Parental Roles and Leadership” examines the issue of paternal authority.

The essay is excellent. I offer this lengthy quote with his permission:

If a wife refuses to submit to the authority of her husband, she loses the spiritual protection and providence of her husband. Whatever rises against an order or authority is deprived of that order and the principle of order. This means that when a wife volitionally rejects the authority of her husband as her spiritual head and head of the family, she takes herself out from underneath his spiritual protection and becomes vulnerable to the demonic since she has taken herself out from under the hierarchy of authority as established by God. Moreover, if she counsels her children contrary to her husband in a matter over which he has legitimate say or if she refuses to allow the children to be under her husband, she also affects the spiritual providence and protection of the children. Read More »

CHRISTIAN P. sends a donation and writes:

THE story of Santa, cheapened every day in a thousand and one ways by a materialistic culture, is like all beautiful stories. It is both true and false. We pretend it’s true for children so that they know that it is true — in other senses but the literal one.

As G.K. Chesterton wrote:

Father Christmas is not an allegory of snow and holly; he is not merely the stuff called snow afterwards artificially given a human form, like a snow man. He is something that gives a new meaning to the white world and the evergreens, so that the snow itself seems to be warm rather than cold. The test -therefore is purely imaginative. But imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call subjective, when they mean false. I Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

[G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man; Dodd, Mead and Company, 1925; Ignatius Press edition, p. 105]

See more on telling children about Santa in this previous discussion here. 

Sergei Kivrin for The New York Times

Russian public school children in 2007

Mushtaq Muhammad / Reuters

French public school children in 2016

Photograph by Cole Garside

Canadian public school children in 2014

(AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

American public school children (sitting on yoga balls) in 2013

WHEN Maria von Trapp — the inspiration for Maria in the movie Sound of Music — came to America, she was amazed at how the season of Advent was submerged under Christmas and at how people ceased to celebrate Christmas with the New Year. See more at Finer Femininity. 

JOHN G. writes:

Thank you for posting the excerpt from the 1944 Christmas Message of Pope Pius XII and the link to the full text.

While I was glad to have the chance to read this historical document, I was appalled by the content. It was Christmas Eve with the world at war, and the Pope chooses to speak about politics. And of all politics to speak about, he chooses “democracy.”

Barely even a hint of Christian Scripture or Tradition or the Magisterium appears in the section of the talk on Democracy, or in the entire address for that matter. Read More »

You can donate through Paypal, or write to me at thinkinghousewife@msn.com for a mailing address.

Thank you for your generosity. May God bless you and your families.

Madonna and Child, Marianne Stokes; 1907

Image Courtesy of It’s About Time

THE FOOLISH FIR TREE

— Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933)

A Little fir grew in the midst of the wood
Contented and happy, as young trees should.
His body was straight and his boughs were clean;
And summer and winter the bountiful sheen
Of his needles bedecked him, from top to root,
In a beautiful, all-the-year, evergreen suit.

But a trouble came into his heart one day,
When he saw that the other trees were gay
In the wonderful raiment that summer weaves
Of manifold shapes and kinds of leaves:
He looked at his needles so stiff and small,
And thought that his dress was the poorest of all.
Then jealousy clouded the little tree’s mind,
And he said to himself, “It was not very kind
“To give such an ugly old dress to a tree!
“If the fays of the forest would only ask me,
“I’d tell them how I should like to be dressed,
“In a garment of gold, to bedazzle the rest!”
So he fell asleep, but his dreams were bad.
When he woke in the morning, his heart was glad;
For every leaf that his boughs could hold
Was made of the brightest beaten gold.
I tell you, children, the tree was proud; Read More »

WHAT COULD be more corrupt than the role played by Rex Tillerson, Trump’s choice for Secretary of State and former head of the Boy Scouts of America, in the organization’s decision to allow openly homosexual boys in the organization? The man is a disgrace. Under his command, Exxon also became a company with a high rating on the “Corporate Equality Index.”

Tillerson is quoted in the BSA’s Scouting magazine as responding to the vote allowing homosexual Scouts as follows:

Regardless of where you were on this decision, it’s also very normal for people to feel like there are winners or losers. I’m here to tell you that’s not true. … There are neither winners nor losers. What’s left after we made the decision to change is the mission, and the mission has not changed.

Millions of boys were the losers.

Given Tillerson’s background, we have reason to believe he will continue to push Hillary’s LGBTQ agenda on the entire world. Read More »

DON VINCENZO writes:

I lived for four years in Norway, and had a good working and social relationship with many of its citizens. Currently, I have family members who live there. However, since my departure nearly three decades ago, the country, primarily under Labor Party governments, has moved in a direction that has given a full-throttle impetus to what I would describe as the “Nanny-Administrative State,” which has assumed the legal and moral authority in separating children from their parents, and parents from their children.

That particular governmental organization is called Barneverent, or Child-Protective Agency.

What follows are the comments of someone I know and trust about the current situation in which children in today’s Norway are separated from their parents in a way that is reminiscent of Stalin’s Russia, One case involved a Czech woman: Read More »

THE real reason many American men don’t take seriously charges of pro-Trump Russian intervention in the election is not because there is no real evidence of intervention. No, the real reason is that they secretly envy Russian men who have submissive wives and are thus willing to let Putin do anything. Where Russia could not conquer through the Communist Party (it was really internationalists who tried to conquer via the Communist Party, but never mind), it will conquer through the reactionary white male.

This is the theory put forth by Vanity Fair writer Peter Savodnik, plumbing the depths of the Trump voter’s twisted psyche. Certainly, the appreciation for Russian women, compared to overworked American feminists who are conditioned to be angry, is real. But to Savodnik, who starts off by dismissing conspiracies and then unquestioningly accepts the fake-news, unsubstantiated conspiracy theory of Russia tipping the election, it is the clue to Trump’s victory via Russian hacking. “Angry white men” would let Putin do anything because he meets their deepest fantasies. No kidding. (What about all those angry white women who voted for Trump? We are left with no answer.)

Donald Trump’s choice of female partners reflects the yearnings and inclinations of these angry, white men—many of whom, one imagines, now comprise his base. Read More »

Pope Pius XII

POPE Pius XII delivered this Christmas message, “Democracy and a Lasting Peace,” in 1944:

“But when the goodness and kindness of God our Saviour appeared” (St. Paul’s Epistle to Titus, Chap. 3, 4th verse).

For the sixth time since the opening of the dreadful war, the Christmas liturgy again hails with these words redolent of peaceful serenity, the coming into our midst of God, Our Saviour.

The humble, mean cradle of Bethlehem, by its wonderful charm, focuses the attention of all believers. Deep into the hearts of those in darkness, affliction and depression there sinks and pervades a great flood of light and joy.

Heads that were bowed lift again serenely, for Christmas is the feast of human dignity, “the wonderful exchange by which the Creator of the human race, taking a living body, deigned to be born of a virgin, and by His coming bestowed on us His divinity” (first antiphon of first vesper for the feast of the Circumcision).

But our gaze turns quickly from the Babe of the Crib to the world around us, and the sorrowful sigh of John the Evangelist comes to our lips: “and the light shines in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (John, first chapter, fifth verse).

For alas, for the sixth time, the Christmas dawn breaks again on battlefields spreading ever wider, on graveyards where are gathered the remains of victims in ever-increasing numbers, on desert lands where a few tottering towers tell with silent pathos the story of cities once flourishing and prosperous, and where bells fallen or carried off no longer awaken the inhabitants with their jubilant Christmas chimes. Read More »

Pope Francis kisses the foot of a refugee during the foot-washing ritual at the Castelnuovo di Porto refugees center near Rome, Italy, March 24, 2016.REUTERS

FROM AN article by the author “Miles Christi” on the efforts by the motor-mouth antipope, Francis, to encourage the racial and religious obliteration of Europe:

Europe is now submerged by the immigration of Muslim masses. The situation is so explosive that one hardly sees how a civil war could be avoided eventually. But “Francis” is a dedicated pro-immigration activist; and such a brazen one that he does not hesitate to point the finger at Europeans and to ask forgiveness to the immigrants because of their so-called “bad reception” in Europe. Well, not only such statements are obviously wrong, but they contribute to reinforce the hostility and contempt of Muslim “refugees” toward this “racist” white and Christian society, which gives them such a bad reception… Read More »