Theologian's Almanac for Week of December 18, 2022
Welcome to SALT’s “Theologian’s Almanac,” a weekly selection of important birthdays, holidays, and other upcoming milestones worth marking — specially created for a) writing sermons and prayers, b) creating content for social media channels, and c) enriching your devotional life.
For the week of Sunday, December 18:
December 18 is the birthday of Methodist hymn writer Charles Wesley, born in Epworth, England, in 1707. His brother, John, became an accomplished preacher, Charles a hymn-writer and song leader. The two attended Oxford, where their classmates teased them for being so serious and methodical about their religious life; they dubbed them, “Methodists,” a name the brothers adopted. They traveled around England on horseback, preaching and leading singing out in the open air to tens of thousands. Hymnals were expensive, and many couldn’t read anyway, so Charles wrote lyrics that could be sung by a leader and then echoed by the congregation. He wrote nearly 9,000 hymns over his lifetime, which averages to about 10 lines of poetry every day for more than 50 years, including “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” and “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.”
December 19 is the day in 1843 that Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol, the heartwarming and harrowing story of Ebenezer Scrooge, the “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” who learns the Christmas spirit of generosity from three ghosts who show him Christmases past, present, and future. In the mid-nineteenth century, Christmas was not yet the cultural and commercial juggernaut it is today (bah, humbug!). A Christmas Carol became wildly popular in both England and the United States, and helped contribute to both the tone and prominence of Christmas as a time of feasting, gift-giving, and merriment.
December 19 is also this year’s beginning of the festival of Hanukkah, the eight-day Jewish celebration commemorating the second-century-BCE rededication of the Jerusalem Temple (“Hanukkah” means “dedication”) by the Maccabees, a small group of Jewish fighters who held out against the much larger Syrian army, who previously had invaded and captured the holy site. The story goes that there was only enough oil to light the temple’s menorah for one night — but the oil miraculously lasted for eight.
December 20 is the day in 1946 that “It’s a Wonderful Life” was first shown in a charity screening at New York City’s Globe Theatre. Starring James Stewart, the film tells the story of George Bailey, a small town businessman who comes to believe that his life has been wasted, and so he decides to commit suicide — but a heavenly messenger intervenes and shows him what life in his town would have been like without him. Reviews of the film were decidedly mixed, and it was financially disappointing. But in the decades that followed, it gradually became a beloved film to watch on television during the Christmas season, and today is considered a classic. Like George Bailey himself, what at first looked like failure was ultimately revealed as success!
December 21 is the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, both the longest night and the shortest day of the year — and the official first day of winter. Solstice celebrations are some of the oldest holidays in human history, going back at least 30,000 years (!). Many ancient stone structures were built with the solstices in mind; Stonehenge, for example, is designed to receive the first rays of solstice sun. Some of our ancient ancestors built bonfires on the winter solstice, in part, it is thought, to lure the sun back after so many months of waning light. Various festivals of light followed from those bonfires, all the way down to the custom today of decorating houses and trees with Christmas lights. The solstice is the pivot point, the beginning of the sun’s return: the daylight on December 22 will last a couple of minutes longer than the daylight on December 21.
December 23 is the birthday of Norman Maclean, born in Clarinda, Iowa, in 1902. Though he also spent his life as a firefighter, scholar, and teacher, he’s best known for his novella, A River Runs Through It, which begins: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.”
December 24 is the anniversary of the “Christmas Eve Truce,” which took place in 1914 along the Western front during World War I. German and British troops had been locked in brutal trench warfare, but on Christmas Eve, sounds of “Stille Nacht” were heard rising from the German side, and some Brits sang back “The First Noel.” Both sides tentatively raised candles and lanterns above the parapets, and the truce began. The soldiers met between the trenches in “no man’s land,” shaking hands, exchanging small gifts (tobacco, alcohol, chocolate), and even playing impromptu games of soccer. In the early morning of December 26, the men returned to their trenches, picked up their weapons — and hostilities resumed. But to this day, the tales of the truce are still told, story after story from up and down the Western front. Check out SALT’s “Strange New World” podcast episode about this event here.
December 24 is also the anniversary of “Silent Night” first being performed at the Church of St. Nicholas in Oberndorf, Austria, in 1818. The young priest there had written the lyrics as a poem two years earlier, and as Christmas Eve approached, the story goes, the church’s pipe organ fell into disrepair. Desperate to avoid a Christmas Eve Mass without music, the young priest hurriedly asked the choir director to write a tune for the poem, and the two performed the simple song as a duet in the Mass (some say a capella, some say accompanied by a guitar) — to the congregation’s delight. The song was an immediate sensation, and today resounds in some 300 languages around the world.
December 24 is also the anniversary of the famous “Earthrise” photograph, taken by the astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, the first to reach and orbit the moon. As they circled the moon, they had the largest television audience in history — and they decided to read from the Book of Genesis, taking turns as they read the first ten verses: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness...” As the spacecraft orbited around to the dark side of the moon and out of radio contact, they ended the broadcast this way: “We close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless you all — all of you on the good Earth.”
Here’s SALT’s short film, “Earthrise,” made in collaboration with the New York Times. And here’s the NYT essay that went with it, co-written by SALT’s own Matthew Myer Boulton.
December 24 is also the anniversary of the first radio broadcast ever, made by Canadian-born electrician and chemist Reginald Fessenden on the coast of Massachusetts in 1906. He opened the broadcast with a short speech, played “O Holy Night” on his violin, read from the Gospel of Luke, and ended with “Merry Christmas.” Ships out on the Atlantic reported receiving the broadcast from miles away.