Archive for December 2020

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The First Before Christmas

Some of the best things at Christmas are traditions. Especially those which have passed down from one generation to the next. Our family has several. One is the yule log, pictured above, which my great aunt used to make for my mother and her family when she was a child. Now my mother makes it for us.

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The Second Before Christmas

By Christianna Hellwig with 0 Comments

I hate how much this year's circumstances have managed to fragment all of us. I hate how much current events have made many of us forget about Christmas, Christ, and the whole gambit. I hate the fact that at the beginning of this year I felt things were finally beginning to get better between me and my

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The Third Before Christmas

By Christianna Hellwig with 0 Comments

I purposely chose a very inaccurate, but beautiful image for today's post because this is a good illustration of what most traditional Spanish carols are like. They are lovely pieces of music, but love to make things up about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph at a prodigious rate, asserting things like: "Mary was a baker,"

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The Fourth Before Christmas

By Christianna Hellwig with 0 Comments

Do you know what great weight hangs on in the incarnation? The weight of sin, redemption, and eternal life. Do you know what would become of us if there were no Christmas day? Death, eternal death for all who have sinned. Do you know what makes Christmas such a joyous occasion? Life, eternal life for all who

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The Fifth Before Christmas

By Christianna Hellwig with 0 Comments

Last year I refused to sing a line of a Christmas carol in choir. It attributed all the joys of Christmas to the fact that a "baby could convince us that he was God's son." Worst of all the song seemed intimate that this was okay. I'm not joking...that was an actual line in a carol. I

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The Sixth Before Christmas

By Christianna Hellwig with 0 Comments

What happens after Christmas day? What will we do? What will happen when all the presents are opened, when the last guest has left? How will we live when the lights have been taken down, the wreaths packed away, the food consumed? My family has never put up lights outside the house, but a few years ago,

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The Seventh Before Christmas

By Christianna Hellwig with 0 Comments

We spend a good deal of time in our Christmas songs focusing on Christ's birth in Bethlehem, his first bed being a manger, the visit of the shepherds, the coming of the wisemen, the star, and even the flight to Egypt, but very few songs touch on how it all began. The reason Jesus was born in

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The Eighth Before Christmas

By Christianna Hellwig with 0 Comments

How many times have you wished for a new day? I don't mean the phenomenon that happens every twenty-four hours wherein the earth's rotation turns our side of the globe to the light. No, I mean the kind of new day that erases every other day of our existence. We have only the knowledge we've gained, perhaps even

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The Ninth Before Christmas

By Christianna Hellwig with 1 Comments

I find myself with little time today, and even less inspiration. I also find myself faced, quite dauntingly, with the exuberant Medieval carol, "Gaudete."As a lover of old music, naturally I would find this carol entrancing, but this one in particular is for all those of you who associate Medieval music with droning chants and endless soliloquies

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The Tenth Before Christmas

By Christianna Hellwig with 0 Comments

It's Christmas tide and I just said yesterday that we ought not to consider the incarnation simply as an onerous task that must be completed for redemption. However, now I wish to look back at the other end of the stick. Yes, it was a joyful occasion, but also one fraught with difficulty. Mary nearly lost her fiance due to a

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The Eleventh of Christmas

By Christianna Hellwig with 0 Comments

There's something about dancing that stirs the blood and raises the spirits. Something that calls from beyond with news of wonderful things. I can't get enough of it. A couple nights ago we learned an English country dance, repeated it, and followed it up with the Virginia reel. At that point everyone there was done. They were leaning on

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The Twelfth before Christmas...

By Christianna Hellwig with 0 Comments

I could barely keep up with my father's large strides. The snow nearly reached my knees, and I struggled to lift my fee high enough with my legs impeded by thick snow pants, but I did it. Every year I anticipated the first snow big snow of the year. First we would all go out and shovel the

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