PAINTINGS by the Swedish artist Carl Larsson (1853-1919) [see my post about Larsson and his family here], can be viewed at It's About Time.

“Encountering a mortally-wounded B-17 limping back to England, Luftwaffe ace Franz Stigler anticipated an easy kill and another opportunity to avenge his brother’s death at the opening of WWII. As he approached the virtually helpless American plane [four days before Christmas in 1943], however, he saw the faces of the dead and wounded crewmen. Then, Stigler’s eyes met those of pilot Charles Brown. Despite the potentially severe consequences of letting an enemy plane escape, Stigler felt that he had to answer a higher call of honor . . . mercy. (more…)

STEVE writes:

The Christmas Truce of 1914 is an extremely inspiring story. It is an inspiration to Christians the world over that those soldiers on that cold night in Flanders Fields, initiated by the Germans, came together in a spirit of chivalrous brotherhood with their opponents on the other side of the trenches and laid down their weapons in honor of the Birthday of the Prince of Peace.

It was perhaps the greatest example in world history of a large number of men, particularly soldiers, following Christ’s commandment to be peacemakers, as you can see in this New American article. [More at Lew Rockwell.] The 2005 Joyeux Noel movie doesn’t show that the German soldiers took great risks to get the British to agree to the truce.

This story needs to be better told as an inspiration to all, especially in the dangerous and eerily similar world we find ourselves in exactly 100 years later, with the same Rothschild bankster forces that started the First World War now trying to start the third. The decent Germans were utterly demonized by malicious British and American hate propaganda, falsely accused of ‘bayonetting Belgium babies,’ raping nuns, crucifying British prisoners, and creating ‘cadaver factories’ and using the body parts of Allied/Entente soldiers for industrial use.

This utterly depraved lying about the German nation is largely responsible for the world we live in today. (more…)

  The Saint Elias Cathedral in the Al-Jadideh quarter of Aleppo will hold its first Christmas ceremony in four years tomorrow. Built in 1873, the church was damaged in three missile attacks by militants. RT News reports on Christmas celebrations in the city where Russia and the Syrian government have brought the civil war to an end.

BRANDON MARTINEZ writes at Non-Aligned Media: We know that Angela Merkel and her globalist regime are committed to the destruction of Germany and the erasure of its culture from existence. By slaughtering indigenous Germans with a truck, [Turkish migrant Anis] Amri was merely executing Merkel’s program for the nation she occupies. She and other self-hating, traitorous German politicians have frankly expressed their desire to make Germans a minority in their own country. A self-hating radical from Germany’s Green Party, Stefanie von Berg, delivered a deranged speech to parliament gloating about the prospect of ethnic Germans becoming a minority in their own cities, hailing her own people’s decline as a “good” thing that should be embraced in order to create a “supercultural” melting pot.

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."

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.” (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. (more…)

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. (more…)

[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. (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. 

Russian public school children in 2007   French public school children in 2016   Canadian public school children in 2014   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. (more…)

IF YOU have found anything of value at this site during the past year, please donate to keep it up and running. Your support is essential. 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.   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; (more…)