MERRY CHRISTMAS! PEACE ON EARTH!

Although the term “Christian” is recorded as first being used in Antioch, the first center of the Church was in Jerusalem and the first Believers were Egyptian, during what is called the “Flight into Egypt”. When Emperor Constantine called for a clarification of Christian Beliefs and the many divergent views of Christianity were formalized, Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, Jerusalem and Rome became the primary centers of Christianity. Rome later broke away but the others remained Orthodox.

When the Western World adopted the Gregorian Calendar, the Orthodox Church continued to use the Julian and today is therefore Christmas Eve for Orthodox Christians. Armenia became officially Christian before the reign of Constantine; the Armenian Church continues to operate independently and follows the Gregorian Calendar.

Related Links >
The Orthodox Church > http://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/catechism_ext.htm

The Orthodox Church: New Edition(Paperback) > http://www.amazon.com/Orthodox-Church-New-Timothy-Ware/dp/0140146563

The Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation(photo source) > http://www.hcef.org

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem > http://www.holylight.gr/patria/enpatria.html

Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople > http://www.ec-patr.org

The Christian Coptic Orthodox Church Of Egypt > http://www.coptic.net/EncyclopediaCoptica

Merry Christmas > http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout5.php&id=2991&blz=1
 

Georgian Santa Claus

Georgian Santa Claus look-alike figure is called “Tovlis Babua”. His name can be translated as ‘Snow Grandfather.’ Georgians took their New Year celebrity from the traditions of a Russian “Ded Moroz”. The character came from the Russian folk fairy tale “Morozko”, which is about an unkind old man, who had a big wooden staff that could turn everybody and everything into ice. According to the legends during the winter solstice this figure had to be appeased. The sacrifice was a young virgin, who had to be wrapped to the tree and left to freeze. If she froze during the day, the sacrifice was supposed to be accepted. The sack of Ded Moroz was initially intended for collecting the offerings. With his wooden staff the evil character beat disobedient children or frightened them with scary tales.

The present image of a Snow Grandfather as a kind generous character was formed only in 1840 in the tale called “Moroz Ivanovich”, written by a Russian writer Vladimir Odoevski. After awhile the Snow Grandfather became a welcomed guest for New Years celebrations, he was believed to be married to the Spring and had a granddaughter called Snegurochka (Georgian Pipkia). Before the revolution bourgeois classes used to decorate a big New Year tree for their children. Since 1927 the Fir tree and Ded Moroz were forbidden by communist authorities, as it was believed to be the remainder of the religious beliefs and superstitions. Only in 1935 the life in Soviet Union was “officially” acknowledged to become “better and lighter” and the Fir Tree and Grandfather with his Snegurochka were allowed.

You Very Own Santa Claus.

Every parent wishes to make the New Year celebration unforgettable for you child. And what can be more exciting than a Santa Claus with his funny group of helpers? Lots of Georgian agencies offer their services to make your children happy on New Year’s Eve. Such famous children centers as Jumpao (28 54 92), Amitis (899 17 33 13), Funny Day (95 99 07), Carol and Pepi is not the whole list of the places where you can order your Santa.

The prices for the pleasant surprise vary depending on your place of living, Santa’s program, gifts and the number of his helpers. The performances cost in average from 30 to 100 lari. Organizers of the holiday night celebration offer the following advice: “If your child is too small and very sensitive it is better to order for him/her a Santa Claus instead of Georgian Tovlis Babua. That is because babies are afraid of the Grandfather’s wooden staff and big sac, while Santa is always more simple and jolly.”

The figure of Santa Claus has a very interesting history. Below is some information taken from different web sites describing the history of this jolly red figure.

From Sinter Klaas to Santa Claus

From the Dutch origin of the old fellow to his current residence in Korvatunturi, Finnish Lapland

Santa Claus is the most famous of all the figures associated with Christmas. We generally know him for being a fat, jolly man with a white beard, dressed in a red suit, and driving a sleigh full of presents which is drawn through the air by eight reindeers.

Although Santa has always been an essential part of the Christmas celebration, the modern image of Santa did not develop until well into the 19th century: Santa Claus was an evolutionary creation, born by the fusion of two religious characters, St. Nicholas from the Netherlands and Christkindl from Germany.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, children in the Netherlands put their shoes by the fireplace for Sinter Klaas (Saint Nicholas), a bishop who lived in the 4th century and was known for bringing gifts to the poor. According to the Dutch tradition, every 5th of December Sinter Klaas would fly from rooftop to rooftop on his white horse while dropping sweets down the chimney into the children’s shoes. In Germany the similar tradition of the Christkindl (Christ Child) was celebrated on the 25th of December.

The story of Sinter Klaas was brought to New Amsterdam (the original name of New York) by Dutch settlers in North America, where Sinter Klaas’ name changed into “Santa Claus”.

In the 1860s German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast popularized the modern image of Santa as our fat, jolly man with a white beard. Some years later, in the 1930s, Scandinavian-American artist Haddon Sundblom painted a Santa Claus dressed in a red suit for a Coca-Cola Christmas advertisement. From there on, the modern image of Santa Claus started to spread across the world.

Everyone has their own Santa

The tradition of Santa Claus has remained particularly strong in the Nordic countries. In Christmas time, a traditional character known as the Yule Goat or Julbock visited the

Scandinavian homes dressed with a goat disguise. The Yule Goat liked to sing and dance, and families offered him drink and food in exchange for his entertainment.

During the 19th century the Yule Goat started to change into the modern Santa Claus who visited homes to give Christmas gifts. The goat disguise was abandoned and the jolly man in red took his place, but the Yule Goat was never forgotten. You can still see the ancient Yule Goat in every Scandinavian home as a traditional decorative item on Christmas trees, gardens and dinner tables.

Among all the Nordic countries, the tradition of Santa Claus is particularly strong in Finland. In the late 1920s it was believed that Santa Claus lived on the remote Korvatunturi Mountains, in Finnish Lapland. Subsequently, in 1985 a permanent Santa Claus office was established in Korvatunturi, so anyone can meet the jolly old fellow and his elves in the Santa Claus Park, where Santa gladly discusses about children’s Christmas wishes.

The British believe that Santa comes to England first and leaves them the biggest presents. He lives in the North Pole and rides around in a sleigh, slipping down chimneys and leaving presents under the tree.

The Scottish, on the other hand, complain that they get all the leftovers….

There is a Santa look-alike in Holland, but he is actually St. Nicholas, the former bishop of Turkey. He rides a white horse and arrives on a boat, and instead of elves, he is accompanied by six to eight black men.

The children of Greece sing carols and enjoy sweets while fending off the Kalikanzari — goblins from the center of the earth who come down the chimney to cause mischief.

At the same time there are plenty of Santa-forsaken corners of the world, like Venezuela where Baby Jesus delivers the presents, while in Germany they await the arrival of the Christmas Angel.

The Calendar of the Christian world began a century before Jesus Christ, by Roman Emperor Julius Ceasar.

This Julian calendar introduced the notion of leap years, however, there were too many and by 1582, the calendar was ten days out of sync with seasons, and this would only become worse.

The name of the current Calendar: The Gregorian Calendar bears its name due to Pope Gregory XIII. He suggested to drop out three leap years in every four hundred years. The calendar will not fall out of step until 5000 AD. A small fix, will keep it in tune until 15000 AD.

Time and Date - Excellent resource for Time.

For Christians and others who celebrate Christmas’s secular traditions, decorating their home and Christmas trees with ornaments is one of the most enjoyable ways to capture the magic and excitement of the Christmas holidays.

The Christmas tree is often explained as a Christianization of pagan tradition and ritual surrounding the Winter Solstice, which included the use of evergreen boughs and pagan tree worship. The modern Christmas tree tradition is believed to have begun in Germany in the 18th century.

The invention of the blowpipe by some unknown artisan brought about the craft of glass blowing, eventually evolving into the fine art of Christmas glass ornaments we know today. Items originally produced were not Christmas ornaments but practical items used mostly in the home. Christoph Muller and Hans Greiner set up Germany’s first glassworks in 1597 in Lauscha (then in the Duchy of Sachsen-Coburg, now in the German state of Thuringia (Thuringen). Lauscha, located in a river valley, had several elements needed for glass making: timber (for firing the glass ovens) and sand. Soon other Glashutten (glassworks) were established in the town, producing drinking glasses, flasks, glass bowls, glass beads (Glasperlen), and even glass eyes (1835).

In 1847 Hans Greiner (a descendent of the Hans Greiner who had established Lauscha’s first glassworks) began producing glass ornaments (Glasschmuck) in the shape of fruits and nuts. These were made in a unique hand-blown process combined with molds. The inside of the ornament was made to look silvery, at first with mercury or lead, then later using a special compound of silver nitrate and sugar water. Greiner’s sons and grandsons, Ernst (b. 1847), Otto (b. 1877), Willi (b. 1903), and Kurt (b. 1932), carried on the Christmas ornament tradition. They were also responsible for another product: glass marbles.

Glass ornaments had become popular in 1846 when an illustration of Queen Victoria’s Christmas tree was printed in a London paper. The royal tree was decorated with glass ornaments from Prince Albert’s native land of Germany. Soon these unique glass Christmas ornaments were being exported to other parts of Europe.

Because of the Puritan influence, Christmas wasn’t widely celebrated in the United States until the 1800s. As a result, decorated trees did not become widely popular until people saw the ornaments brought to America by families emigrating from Germany and England in the 1840s. Some historians attribute the Hessians, German mercenaries fighting in the Revolutionary War, with introducing Americans to decorated trees.

In the 1880s the American dime-store magnate F. W. Woolworth discovered Lauscha’s Glaskugeln during a visit to Germany. He made a fortune by importing the German glass ornaments to the U.S. By 1890, he was selling $25 million worth of ornaments at nickel and dime prices.

Germany faced virtually no competition until 1925. Then Japan began producing ornaments in large quantities for export to this country. Czechoslovakia also entered the field with many fancy ornaments. By 1935, more then 250 million Christmas tree ornaments were being imported to the United States.

The work of the German glass blowers and the distribution of the German ornaments remained almost unchanged from the middle of the 19th century through World War ll. When the Russian occupation of Germany began in 1953, many of the old world family molds that had been passed down for generations among all the families in Lauscha were destroyed. Families splintered when craftsmen fled their homeland to settle in Neustadt, a territory occupied by Americans, later establishing what is now the modern day Inge-glas workshop.

During the occupation, members of the Muller-Blech family stayed behind in Lauscha. Some of the old molds were found in garbage piles; other molds were bartered for. Since the border guards would have destroyed the molds if they had known the molds were going across the border, they were ingeniously smuggled. The molds were in two pieces, so, to ensure that the entire mold would get across the border, present day Inge-glas owner Klaus Muller-Blech’s grandmother would send them to him in a box of about a dozen or so, but only one half of each mold. She would put a note with the package, “Little Klaus, here are some molds for you to play with in the sand.” By sending the molds this way the border guards would think that the molds were of no importance. Later she would send the other half of the mold in a similar manner. For many years the old original recipe used to making the molds was lost. Recently the recipe to make the original molds used for making the old world Christmas glass ornaments was found, making Inge-glas the only company able to exactly reproduce the old molds.

The Muller-Blech family practiced the craft of ornament blowing in the same workshops in Lauscha Germany for thirteen generations. In the 1960’s Klaus Muller-Blech, a 14th generation descendant, and Birgit Eichhorn Jeremias-Sohn, descendant of the Eichhorn family, joined forces by marriage and combined their familys’ tradition and skills at the Inge-glas workshop. Today their collection includes more than 6000 antique blown glass ornaments molds dating from the 1850s. In addition, new ornaments are created each year to represent the traditions of today.

To find out if you own any original Inge-glas ornaments, look for the authentic star crown ornament holder. This star crown is the Inge-glas trademark. The Inge-glas ornaments are recognizable as one of the oldest generational German Christmas ornament makers and in the year 2000 Inge-glass established their own distribution site in the United States.Not until 1939 and the outbreak of World War II did an American company significantly enter the ornament business. Using a machine designed to make light bulbs, Corning engineers produced more than 2,000 ornament balls a minute.In 1973, Hallmark introduced six glass ball ornaments and 12 yarn figures as the first collection of Hallmark Keepsake Ornaments, a new tradition of Christmas decorating was started and a new collectible industry was born. When the first line was introduced, they were unique in design, year-dated and available only for a limited time, innovations in the world of ornaments. Since 1973, Hallmark has introduced more than 3,000 different Keepsakes Ornaments and more than 100 ornament series, groups of ornaments that share a specific theme.The finished Keepsake Ornaments reflect the way styles, materials, formats and technology have expanded since the first ones appeared in Hallmark stores in 1973. Once a collection of decorated glass balls and yarn figures, ornaments are now made in a wide array of wood, acrylic, bone china, porcelain, and handcrafted formats.

Many unusual glass Christmas ornament traditions and stories have evolved from the German families. The Germany tradition of hanging a Christmas glass ornament pickle on the Christmas tree is the oddest German Christmas ornament story, some say even a myth. The pickle ornament is always the last ornament to be hung on the Christmas tree, with the parents hiding the pickle glass ornament in the Christmas tree among all the other ornaments. When the children are allowed to view the Christmas tree they would begin gleefully searching for the German Christmas glass ornament pickle. The children knew that whoever found the pickle ornament first would receive an extra little gift and would be the one to begin the unwrapping of the Christmas gifts. I would be interested to hear from any readers that have experienced this tradition.

For most of us, Christmas music is bound up with that nice mixture of emotional wooziness and enjoyable aching in the throat you get at a carol service.

Nostalgia is really the keynote of much Christmas music. Bing Crosby’s White Christmas sets the tone. It’s all about harking back to a time when there was more true togetherness, and more proper snow.

But out beyond Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and Bing there’s a vast treasure of Christmas music that doesn’t sound nostalgic at all. Go back to the earliest Christmas songs, and you find a lusty heartiness that lives in the moment.

The feast of Christmas was overlaid on pagan festivals celebrating the winter solstice, and in things such as the Wassail Song and the Boar’s Head Carols you can feel a pagan energy.

The Holly and the Ivy seems decorous enough now, but in the 14th century it was a danced and sung word game full of bawdy double entendres, the prickly holly was man, the twining ivy was woman. Two centuries later Henry VIII added to this repertoire with his carol Green Grow’th the Holly.

By this time there was already a millennium and a half of Christmas music in the Church, but it had no particular Christmas flavour. Come forward in time, though, and one simple “Christmassy” quality reveals itself: splendour.

This is the most joyous festival in the calendar, so it was only right that the clergy should put on their best vestments, the church should be full of candles and flowers, and the musicians should put on the best possible show.

“Splendour” at first meant towering vocal polyphony. One of the first surviving polyphonic pieces, Pérotin’s Viderunt omnes, has a Christmas text. But as you move forward into the Renaissance and Baroque, splendour means colour and contrast and drama. And that means telling the Christmas story in music, which gives lots of scope for human and picturesque touches.

In Heinrich Schütz’s Christmas Story, composed around 1660, the angel’s words are haloed in strings, the shepherds are signalled by “rustic” recorders and bassoons, the wise men have solemn trombones, and Herod is accompanied by trumpets. This is the beginning of a line of big festive pieces that leads to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and Handel’s Messiah, which wasn’t written to celebrate Christmas, but was bound to be co-opted into the season’s music, given its subject matter.

So far, so predictable. But what about those Baroque instrumental pieces such as Corelli’s Christmas Concerto? What have they got to do with Christmas?

A clue is given by an old Italian custom you can still see in Rome between Christmas and New Year. Musicians in rustic dress come into the main squares to play plangent melodies on the piffero and zampogna, shawm and bagpipe.

They’re students at the Accademia, mostly, and you can see the trainers peeping out under their “shepherds’ “ smocks. It’s a touching sound, though, and a reminder of a link between Christmas and the pastoral. In painting, it’s the three wise men with their gorgeous robes who get pride of place in nativity scenes. But it’s the shepherds who call the tune in Christmas music. Baroque composers left us hundreds of gently lilting Christmas pastorals, the most famous ones being Corelli’s and the one in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.

Once the middle class takes centre stage in history, Christmas music becomes well behaved. The pastoral tone and the tipsiness disappear, apart from odd moments such as Tchaikovsky’s Second Quartet, where there’s an amusing portrayal of the Russian custom of drunken Christmas visits in costume.

Instead, we get cosily domestic Christmas music, written for instruments such as the piano and harmonium. But this isn’t yet nostalgia; the emotion is still real, and strong. If you doubt that, listen to Arnold Schoenberg’s Weihnachtsmusik.

You won’t believe that that fearsome inventor of “modern music” could have written something so exquisite and touching.

Download Your Favourite Christmas Carols Music and Songsheets

The carols are: Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Silent Night, In the Bleak Midwinter, O Come, all ye Faithful, O Little Town of Bethlehem, Once in Royal David’s City, God Rest ye Merry, Gentlemen, It Came upon the Midnight Clear, Coventry Carol and Away in a Manger. To download the carol backing music, right-click on the button next to ‘download,’ choose ‘Save target as …’ and save the sound file to your computer.

Christmas
Christmas (literally, the Mass of Christ) is a traditional holiday in the Christian calendar which takes place around the end of December and celebrates the nativity of Jesus Christ. Christmas is also celebrated as a secular holiday throughout much of the world, including countries with small Christian populations, such as Japan. The precise date of the birth and historicity of Jesus are much debated (see Jesus).

The word Christmas is often abbreviated to Xmas, possibly because the letter X resembles the Greek letter Χ, which is the first letter of Christ’s name as spelled in Greek.

Christmas in the Arts and Media
A large number of Christmas stories have been written, usually involving heart-touching tales that involve a Christmas miracle. Several have passed into popular culture and become part of the Christmas tradition.

Perhaps the most popular is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the tale of curmudgeonly miser Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge rejects compassion and philanthropy, and Christmas as a symbol of both, until he is visited by the “Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future”, who show him the consequences of his ways. Through this and other Christmas stories, Dickens is sometimes credited with shaping the modern celebration of Christmas (tree, plum pudding, carols) and the movement to close businesses on Christmas day.

If Dickens shaped the wider traditions of Christmas, Thomas Nast and Clement Moore provided us with the popular images of Santa Claus. Nast’s 19th century cartoons gave Santa his familiar form, while Moore’s poem A Visit from Saint Nicholas (popularly known as The Night Before Christmas) gave us the rotund Santa and his sleigh landing on rooftops on Christmas Eve.

Another Christmas story is the acclaimed film, It’s a Wonderful Life whose theme mirrors A Christmas Carol. Its hero, George Bailey, is a businessman who sacrificed his dreams to help his community. On Christmas Eve, a guardian angel finds him in despair and prevents him from committing suicide, by magically showing him how much he meant to the world around him.

Radio and TV stations popularize Christmas by broadcasting Christmas carols and Christmas songs. Many TV shows celebrate the holiday with a “Christmas Special” episode. In addition to popular music, classical music like the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s The Messiah may also be played.

To read more please visit > http://www.spiritrestoration.org/Church/Holidays/Christmas.htm

It is fitting to start this account with this image, as in many ways, it shows the start of the Christmas story. It was painted by Fra Angelico (c.1390-1455) a Dominican friar, probably for the Dominican house of San Domenico in Fiesole, near Florence. It was bought in 1612 for the Duke of Lerma’s chapel in the Dominican church of Valladolid in Spain where it remained until its acquisition by the Prado.

Angelico shows us not only the moment of Christ’s Incarnation in the Annunciation scene, but the very reason for it, by painting the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden in the left background. An angel ushers Adam and Eve out of a lush garden, rendered almost like a tapestry. The couple are wearing clothes so the moment of shame - linked to consciousness of their nakedness and sin - has happened. However, the most important part of the painting is clearly the foreground, where Gabriel announces to Mary that she will conceive and bear a child and she replies with humility ‘behold the handmaid of the Lord’. Mary’s acceptance of her role in the salvation of mankind, and Christ’s taking on her human flesh is crucial in the history of redemption and also in Eucharistic terms. The body of Christ, consumed in the Eucharist, is a human, fleshly body which was sacrificed on the cross for the sins of mankind. This difficult doctrinal message had to be rendered pictorially in a clear and readable fashion. Angelico places the Annunciation in an architectural setting of a Renaissance loggia, very similar to the loggie and cloisters of his own convent of San Marco, designed by his contemporary, Michelozzo (1396-1472). A shaft of golden light falls from the left bearing the dove of the Holy Spirit. Mary is seated with her hands crossed over her chest, an open book on her knee. The open book symbolises the Word, which is being made flesh at that moment, and also recalls the prophecy of Isaiah. Sculpted in the spandrels of the loggia is the head of God the Father, so all three persons of the Trinity are present: God the Father in the sculpted relief, the dove of the Holy Spirit in the shaft of light, and Christ, by implication, in the womb of the Virgin.

The Nativity story is told in the Gospel of St. Luke (2:1-7). Joseph is called to Bethlehem to take part in a census. Mary accompanies him: ‘She was pregnant, and while they were in Bethlehem, the time came for her to have her baby. She gave birth to her first son, wrapped him in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger - there was no room for them to stay in the inn.’Luke then goes on to describe how angels announce the birth of Christ to nearby shepherds. We can see, however, that the actual account of the birth is very sketchy, and it was fleshed out by centuries of Christian tradition and by apocryphal gospels - i.e. those gospels which were not accepted as authentic by the Church. Much of the detail of the Christmas tradition comes in fact from the apocryphal gospel of the Pseudo-Matthew, a text which appeared in the west in the 8th and 9th centuries. Some versions were preceded by letters which purported to come from Saint Jerome, testifying to the truth of its contents and claiming responsibility for its tranlsation. Some copies of the text attributed it to James, son of Joseph.  In this text, an angel tells Mary that parturition is near and orders her to enter into an underground cave. At the entrance of Mary the grotto begins to glow like the sun. The Pseudo-Matthew then tells of how the Virgin gives birth to a son in the grotto, and angels circle him as soon as he his born, singing ‘Gloria to God in the highest and peace on earth to men of goodwill.’ A while before, Joseph had departed in search of midwives, but when he returns Mary has already given birth. Preachers often stressed how the Virgin was exempt from the pains of childbirth suffered by other women as a consequence of the sin of Eve and did not need the attentions of midwives. The midwives he brings are named Zelomi and Salomè but they stand outside the grotto afraid to enter because of the light. Zelomi enters and touches the virgin and exclaims on her virginity: ‘A Virgin has conceived, a Virgin has given birth, a Virgin remains. Salomè, outside, disbelieves and the story of the withered hand is told [Editor’s note: Testing Mary’s virginity with her finger, Salomè’s hand withered]. The shepherds are told of the birth by an angel, and an enormous star appears over the grotto. The third day after the birth, Mary leaves the grotto and enters a stable, she puts the child in a manger and the ox and the ass adore him. The author clearly added these elements, not found in scripture, to show that the prophecy of Isaiah was fulfilled. These details became absorbed in popular medieval texts like the thirteenth-century Golden Legend, written by the Dominican friar James of Varazze (Jacobus de Voragine), often described as a ‘medieval bestseller’.

This is from an excellent source, which I recommend to visit and view some great pictures. Please visit > http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/article3.php?id=340