HERE is a short video about one of the most beautiful and well-known carols.

THE 16th-century carol is sung here by The Sixteen. A description of the carol and another recording can be found here:

The “Coventry Carol” is a Christmas carol dating from the 16th century. The carol was performed in Coventry in England as part of a mystery play called The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors. The play depicts the Christmas story from chapter two in the Gospel of Matthew. The carol refers to the Massacre of the Innocents, in which Herod ordered all male infants under the age of two in Bethlehem to be killed. The lyrics of this haunting carol represent a mother’s lament for her doomed child. Read More »

I MAKE no claim to understand fully this complex subject, but a reader highly recommends Vaccine Truth, a website run by Wendy Callahan, who writes:

Since the beginning of time, a mother’s primary role has been to protect her young. It’s a role that most mothers take very seriously. When the medical community introduced vaccines to protect children from the ravages of disease, it was only natural for mothers to want their children protected. It wasn’t until my son started having seizures seven days after his MMR, DTaP, HiB, and Pneumococcal vaccination at fifteen months, that I started researching the wisdom of this practice. Like most of us I thought vaccines were harmless, tested for safety, and a necessity. Since he had just been vaccinated, I had my “What you need to know” fact sheet that had been given to me by my pediatrician. Read More »

Alabama ex-slave Molly Hammond

IT’S ABOUT TIME has posted excerpts from slave memories of Christmas in the American South, taken from The Slave Narratives, a collection of interviews with 3,500 ex-slaves compiled by the Federal Writers Project and archived at the Library of Congress. Molly Ammond is quoted:

“Us was treated fine. Our folks was quality. We had plenty somp’n t’eat, but dem slaves hadda work powerful hard though. Atter dey come home fum de fields dey was so tired dat dey go right to sleep, except when de massa had barbecues. Christmas was de big time; dere was several days to res’ an’ make merryin’…”

Illustrated London News, 1915

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. The 2006 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.

Merry Christmas.

SOME say it’s “just a story.” It’s true, it is a story. But it’s not just a story.

God took the form of a human baby. In this way, he conveyed His desire for our love. Almost everyone is touched by, is capable of feeling for, a tender baby.

Why does God want to be loved by us? He doesn’t need our love. He is self-sufficient and needs nothing. His desire for our love must be an extension of His love for us, his creatures.

“He seems to forget that He is God, because of the greatness of this desire. His ever-blessed Majesty will forgive us words of this sort, by which alone we can force upon our dull hearts the conviction of the immensity of His love. He appears to deny His own nature and greatness in order to obtain our love.”

[The Creator and the Creature, Frederick William Faber, D.D., Tan Books, 1961]

There is nothing more humbling than God’s love. It seems unintelligible. It is a mystery. And it accounts for all of the joy of Christmas, whether we realize it or not.

Merry Christmas! May you and your families have peace and happiness today.

FROM a Christmas meditation at Tradition in Action by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira:

There is no human being weaker than a newborn child. There is no poorer dwelling than a cave. There is nothing more rudimentary than a manger crib. However, that Child in that cave, and laid in that manger was to transform the course of History.

And what a transformation! The most difficult of all, because it was to orient men on the path opposed to all their inclinations: the path of austerity, sacrifice and the cross. It was to invite a world broken by superstition, religious syncretism and complete skepticism in order to become a world of Faith. It was to invite a mankind inclined to every iniquity to start to practice justice. It was to make an appeal to detachment from a world that loved pleasure in all its forms. It was to attract to purity a world where every depravity was known, practiced and adopted.

It was an obviously unfeasible task, but the Divine Child began, from His first moment on this earth, to take on that work which neither the force of hatred, power nor human passions could contain. And He conquered: The Prince of Peace established His Kingdom, which shall have no end.  [cont.]

WHY can’t most families live on one income anymore? Because the Federal Reserve System is economic plunder. Inflation is a tax. The median house was worth about $58,000 in 1960 in 2000 dollars. It is close to $200,000 now. Inflation of this type is caused by increases in the money supply, not by increased demand and natural growth. No nation in history has taken on fiat currency, which is the creation of money out of nothing, without having its economy destroyed. Credit cards, the overworked family, skyrocketing national debt, a shrinking birth rate cover up the reality.

This video was made in 2011, but it is as relevant today as ever. Pay particular attention close to the end where the discussion turns to the likelihood of a North American currency and then a single global currency, both of which will be part of the scam and the economic rape of private central banking.

Rooftops in the Snow, Gustave Caillebotte

HERE is the latest installment in “Tales of Chester,” my husband’s recollections of growing up in the factory town of Chester, Pennsylvania, a place alive in memory but long since gone as he knew it.

My first memory of snow is delightfully ambiguous, textured, deeply embedded. On a Monday morning in January when I was five, the house had a different feel, shut off from all light, blessedly isolated. I opened the back door and saw the yard layered in snow untouched by human feet.

From examining the records, I now know this would have been the first major snowstorm in my lifetime. What a magnificent sight, and the wearisome odors of exhaust, factory smoke and decay were replaced by a scent bracing and stunningly fresh.

Yet, the most-enduring memory isn’t visual or olfactory. It is the profound silence. Chester was a noisy place, and never noisier than on a Monday morning when the workweek sounds prevailed with new vigor after a weekend of rest. Low-flying planes were taking off from and approaching Philadelphia International Airport, nine miles away. We lived a half block from busy commuter train tracks. Our street was a major traffic artery. Punctuating the chronic noises were the factory and fire whistles, school bells and church bells. The snow muted them all, as if the city had been sealed in a vault. The only noise was that of distant-sounding tire chains moving slowly atop the snow pack, urban sleigh bells. This was a morning of unprecedented tranquility. I wanted more.

Chester, Pennsylvania was not in an exceptionally snowy area. It was not a place of avalanches or howling blizzards or St. Bernards rescuing travelers buried up to their necks. And yet from Thanksgiving to late March, after that initial snow, I would come to live in anticipation. If it was in the forecast, I couldn’t sleep until I saw the first randomly falling flakes, those wintry fireflies, flashing against the dim street light through a well-rubbed circle of a dirty bedroom window. Then I couldn’t sleep, period.

Worse, I couldn’t hide this passion from adults; no kid wants adults to have access to his inner thoughts, especially thoughts so clearly childlike. And childlike, they were. For snow was bad, and all adults despised it.

Weeks after that initial experience, the snow that had enchanted me long gone, I spied Charlie Buckley, an elderly friend of my father’s who often ate dinner with us, approaching our house on the brick sidewalk. The air smelled of snow. How I so desperately wanted to see the dirt outlines of the bricks iced with white, and then watch the snow make the walkway vanish! I wanted an all-conquering snow, like the one that entombed our house earlier that winter, to erase the concrete and the blacktop, to blanket the homely roofs, to veil the factory smoke, to redefine the hideous town. I ran to meet him and anxiously sought assurance that it was about to snow. He was disappointingly noncommittal. Mr. Buckley was the essence of dignity. He always wore a starched white shirt and a tie to match his perfect suits. My mother said even his toenails were perfectly cropped. He had too much decency to tell me the truth.

While he waited for dinner, Mr. Buckley read the paper in our living room. He called me over to the chair by the lamp. “It is going to snow,” he announced, not looking up from the paper.

How do you know?

“Look.” With an index finger he pointed to an “s” in the far-left column of the front page, and “n” in the third column, an “o” in the fourth, and “w” in the far-right one. “See,” he said. “S-N-O-W. It’s going to snow.” I was ecstatic. I composed a song. “It’s going to snow … It’s going to snow … you can bet your life it’s going to snow.”

You would have lost that life.

In the 1950s, before the Weather Channel, Accu-Weather, Doppler radar and the chat boards, publicly available information about the weather was sparse. Forecasts were delivered soberly on the local TV stations by anti-children weathermen who professed to hate “that white stuff,” although one of them was having a hard time disguising a rooting interest.

My three older brothers were convinced that TV weathermen, being adults, were militantly anti-snow. They believed our lack of snow was tied to a media conspiracy. “You hear that?” my brother Frank would say. “He said ‘snow,’ and then ‘Oops.’” I could not admit that I missed the reference. On another evening, although I missed it once again, a weatherman must have mentioned snow overtly, because my oldest brother, George, insisted that we all report to the basement immediately to sharpen our rusted sled blades.

Of course, it didn’t snow.

My peers and schoolmates also craved snow, but I did not share their casual, practical and outlaw attitudes toward it. They wanted enough to close the inherently loathsome schools. They wanted enough to ride their brakeless sleds down Crosby Street hill, which emptied into the aforementioned Seventh Street, where years before a cousin had been run over by a car and tragically killed. The “big guys” wanted enough to go “car-hopping.” This was another life-threatening practice in which the participants grabbed onto the bumpers of slow-moving vehicles, squatted and used their galoshes for street skis. They wanted at least enough to make snowballs to hurl at the buses and the unfortunate men who inhabited the Rescue Mission. I never saw anyone in the neighborhood attempt anything as wholesome as building a snowman. I was with them on the school issue, but I was wary of brake-less sledding; too wise, if not too chicken to hop cars, and I couldn’t make a snowball, let alone a snowman.

For me it wasn’t about sledding, car-hopping, snowball-hurling or the snowman. It was about the snow itself. I wanted to have it, to luxuriate in it, to roam around the dingy city admiring its power to transform. Read More »

SEVEN recent examples of gag orders and bullying by Paul A. Phillips.

THE New York Times featured an article Saturday about the rise of anti-Muslim crimes in the U.S. Mike King wrote a rebuttal, at the Anti-New York Times (get a reduced price subscription here until Friday):

Putting aside for a moment the bloody damn evil of the whole Zionist-Marxist mendacity machine, one has to stand in awe of the sheer genius of it all — particularly the manner in which these Sons of Satan will so often accomplish multiple objectives with a single play.

Take the War on Iraq, for example. At the behest of the Jewish Power, an enemy ruler, Saddam Hussein, was removed from power in Iraq (and executed) while the “White” Republican’t Party got stuck with all the blame for starting the disastrous war. As a result, the Marxist Democrats took control of Congress in 2006 and the Marxist queers Mr. & Mr. Obongo were installed in the White House in 2008.

The most recent illustration of this two-for-one subversion move involves the back-to-back false flag attacks of Paris and San Bernardino, California. As always, Muslims / Arabs were falsely accused while ignorant Whites and the Republican Party walked right into the trap of spouting overtly bigoted rhetoric that will only serve to alienate non-Whites — pushing them further and further into the Democrat-Marxist camp.

Of course, leave it to the slanderous Slimes [The New York Times] to then piss and whine about the very same “Islamo-Phobia” and “racism” which its own seditious scribblers created by selling one false-flag event after another after another after another to the gullible public. Read More »

DR. Kenneth Stoller contends vaccines can cause autism and disrupt the immune system. “The contents of vaccines are a toxic soup of ingredients that have never been safety tested appropriately,” he states.

“It is time to lift our heads out of the sand about the autism epidemic.”

Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, built before St. Louis became a city of shmoos

ALAN writes:

It is now customary at this time of year to bemoan the latest examples of the War on Christmas.  It is important to do that, but it is more important to remember the larger cultural context and not to be preoccupied with concretes.

Lawrence Auster wrote that the America in which he and his generation were born is being erased.

For me, one of the decisive proofs that that judgment is correct was not the fact that agitators were launching numerous attacks on traditional American cultural celebrations of Christmas, but the way that most Americans responded to those attacks:  In silence or outright capitulation.

That, I thought to myself, is not the reaction of people who are confident in who and what they are.  Americans in 1955 would have laughed at anyone who launched an attack on their cultural celebrations of Christmas, or would have advised them to take a long walk off a short pier.  The mayor and businessmen in St. Louis were just such men in the 1950s. Read More »

PAUL C. writes:

An indication of how fallen we are in the U.S.A. is a TV network having a special tonight with A-list musical talent honoring the seventy-fifth birthday of John Lennon instead of the birth of Our Lord.

MY apologies to readers who sent a video of a rat walking down the steps of a New York subway station. Readers sent this disturbing clip of a rodent with a slice of pizza in its mouth to advance ongoing studies of the Pizza Industrial Complex at this site. However, due to my husband’s extreme sensitivity to all images of rodents, I cannot post it.

I will say one thing.

If you didn’t know that rats all over America nightly feast on the styrofoam crusts and congealed faux cheese of leftover pizza slices, you are clueless. My family once saw a fox in the mountains walking down a picturesque highway, seemingly miles from the nearest pizza outlet, and it had a whole slice of pizza in its mouth. The pervasiveness of the Product has probably interfered with the predatory development of hundreds of species. Multiply the opportunities of the country fox by millions to get a sense of the urban rat’s diet. Pepperoni. Hot dog stuffed crust. Pineapple and ham. He’s had it all. Daily. The rat population would be decimated if Domino’s and Papa Johns closed.

It’s not shocking that rats eat industrial-grade pizza. It’s shocking that human beings do.

‘Young Negro-Girl’ by Simon Maris (1900), now called ‘Young Girl Holding a Fan

FROM The Independent:

In a controversial move, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is removing any terms that might be considered offensive from the digitised titles and descriptions of the 220,000 artworks it has collected.

Words like ‘negro’, ‘Indian’ and ‘dwarf’ are all going, according to ArtsBeat, replaced with less triggering terms.

The 1900 painting ‘Young Negro-Girl’ for instance, will now be called ‘Young Girl Holding a Fan’.

“The point is not to use names given by whites to others,” said Martine Gosselink, head of the history department at the Rijksmuseum.

ALAN writes:

As one who contributed (four years ago) to the debate about being surrounded by people who are smiling mindlessly, I offer these comments on the latest chapter in that debate.

I suggest that smiling is acceptable only if done for a valid reason.  “Because everyone else is doing it,” “Because advertising depicts it,” and “Because busybodies are forever telling us to smile” are not valid reasons.

I for one will argue that the mass promotion of smiling is a sign of a culture on its way downward.

Do the Amish agree to walk around wearing perpetual smiles and thus looking like idiots? Read More »

WEEKS before the San Bernardino attack, Newt Gingrich tweeted about a “California terrorist attack.” Doesn’t prove anything, but it is unsettling. See more here and here.