Every family has traditions: some seem as old as time itself, and some are of more recent vintage. Those of a certain age—the age which finds computers incomprehensible and cell-phones intolerable—will remember with fondness the celebrations of Christmas past, not in a ghostly fashion, but with the interior warmth of the brandy-soaked Christmas pudding. There is nothing of Mr. Scrooge about these memories; there is more than enough humbug provided today by the apostles of commerce, who begin their commodification of an ersatz Nativity somewhere between the end of Easter and the Feast of All Saints.
Hilaire Belloc—that extraordinary Frenchman more English than John Bull, who, along with Swift, can justifiably be called one of England’s greatest essayists—wrote, in the last century, an essay entitled “A Remaining Christmas.” It is a tradition of mine to read it every Christmas, in order to induce melancholy, fortified by Georgian wine and Armagnac, at what has been lost.
Belloc wrote that the purpose of his essay, in a world “changing very fast,” was to describe what remained of the observance of Christmas—not the modern absurdity of the single day, but the proper liturgical and familial celebration of the Twelve Days—“in a certain house in England.” The house was in Belloc’s beloved Sussex, where he lived from 1906 until his death in 1953. There was much happiness in the house, but also tragedy, for his American wife died at a young age, and he lost two sons: one killed in the First World War, and another in the Second.
Maise Ward, Chesterton’s biographer, wrote in 1933 of the universality of Christianity, and its fullest and most complete embodiment, Catholicism, but she also observed, “Because it is sacramental it is intensely local, found in each country in a special and unique fashion, not in spirit only but in a spirit clothed in material form.”
That telling last phrase, “a spirit clothed in material form,” not only speaks to the importance of nations and customs, but also the reason for the celebration of Christmas and for the particular ways it is (or was) celebrated by Belloc and his family—and suggests how it might be revived.
Belloc’s description, which he insists might sound “very strange,” is not at all strange for those who understand the meaning of the Incarnation, and therefore the reason for feasting and celebration. He argues that all the habits and traditions are not only “sacred, but normal, having in the whole of the complicated affair a sacramental quality and an effect of benediction.” It is precisely because of the stupendous fact that “the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us,” that we worship and feast—and feast we must. The Incarnation of the Son of God, and His birth in the cave of Bethlehem, gave birth to the sacraments—the spiritual clothed, in many ways, “in material form,” as powerfully as the Blood and Water flowing from His pierced side at Calvary.
There is a reason why the Puritans banned Christmas, and why they disliked the riotous celebrations of eating and drinking. A religion that despises or disdains the sacramental cannot abide the human forms of celebration which embody a recognition of God’s use of the material world. Belloc wrote, “Man has a body as well as a soul, and the whole of man, soul and body, is nourished sanely by a multiplicity of observed traditional things.”
A significant part of the counter-culture which must come from any talk of a revival of the Faith, however small, will be a new understanding of the sacramental world, which some are calling the “enchanted world.” This will be one of the ways of being a “creative minority,” prophesied for the Church, especially in Europe in the ’60s, by the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI.
From the worship of the Incarnation comes the richness and rightful reason for twelve days of eating, drinking, merriment and tradition. Belloc’s joyful words ring especially true at Christmas:
Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so. Benedicamus Domino!
This essay appears in the Winter 2025 issue of The European Conservative, Number 37:12-13.
