By JAMES MONTI
Christmas Eve has about it a certain air of mystery and wonder. This “mystique” of the night of Christ’s birth transcends national boundaries, with each Catholic culture expressing it in its own distinctive manner.
In his classic work A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens has famously evoked this perception of Christmas Eve as a night when almost anything miraculous can happen, a concept that has a long history. The ancient Carol of the Birds, a Christmas song of Catalonian Spain said to date back to the ninth century, tells of the sparrow, the eagle, and the robin coming from afar “when rose the eastern star” to rejoice together at the birth of the Savior.
Legends about Christmas Eve abound, relating strange and unparalleled happenings, from animals talking at midnight to bees humming a lullaby for the Christ Child. In the 15th and early 16th centuries there were even eyewitness accounts in Germany of apple trees suddenly bringing forth blossoms and fruit during the holy night.
Underlying the talk of Christmas Eve prodigies is a deeply rooted sense of the sacred about the night when mankind first saw the face of God Incarnate and heard His voice on Earth. Christmas is perhaps a child’s earliest introduction to a sense of the sacred. The various carols that speak of a unique silence covering the Earth on Christmas Eve acclimate us at a very young age to the idea of “sacred silence,” those periods of meditative silence that liturgists taking their cue from Pope Benedict XVI have stressed as an essential component in the reverent celebration of the liturgy.
Christmas also in a way restores to the night its primal innocence. For when God first created the Earth He also created the daily cycle of day and night as something “very good” (Gen. 1:4-5, 31). It was only after the fall of man that night became a time of fear and danger and acquired its association with the Prince of Darkness. The birth of Christ in the heart of the night, followed thirty-three years later by His nocturnal Resurrection from the tomb, has shattered Satan’s reign over the night. Notice how children who are normally fearful of the night do not fear the nightfall of Christmas Eve.
In devout Catholic families the tradition of telling children that their Christmas presents have been brought by a holy visitor to their home on Christmas Eve, whether the visitor is said to be St. Nicholas, an angel, or the Christ Child Himself, has nothing to do with secular society’s attempts to make Christmas a celebration of materialism, but rather its purpose is to nurture in the child a sense of the supernatural and the otherworldly that will prepare him eventually to understand the true meaning of Christmas as God’s priceless and utterly astounding gift of Himself to mankind.
Christmas Eve is also marked by the singing of carols in the home. Many of the finest carols have a decidedly melancholic hue to them. This is no accident. While contemporary culture’s rendering of Christmas casts this feast as little more than a “feel good, be happy” occasion, the centuries-old Catholic perception of Christmas gazes unflinchingly upon what Christ came to do and what He came to rescue us from.
It is this Catholic understanding that prepares us for those Christmases when there will be an empty place at the table, left painfully vacant by the death of a family member. In Austria, Poland, and Switzerland there is a poignant tradition of visiting the graves of loved ones on Christmas Eve.
The carol What Child Is This? has circulated with two different sets of verses. In one version the words do not venture beyond the Nativity in Bethlehem, but in the other, the original version composed by William Chatterton Dix (1837-1865) and first published in 1871, we are taken from Bethlehem to Calvary to remember the nails, spear, and cross of the Passion that Christ was born to undergo for our redemption.
The illustration accompanying the hymn in its first printing accentuates this by depicting beneath the Manger scene the instruments of the Passion. The Appalachian carol I Wonder as I Wander likewise reminds us that Christ came to die for us.
The medieval English Coventry Carol, by its words and haunting music, serves as a stark reminder of how quickly the battle between Christ and Satan ensued following the Lord’s birth, with Herod slaughtering Bethlehem’s little children in a futile, demonically inspired attempt to snuff out the Light of the World.
In Franco Zeffirelli’s masterful 1977 dramatization of the life of Christ Jesus of Nazareth, the words placed in Herod’s mouth as he orders the slaughter of the Holy Innocents, “This is my world! I will not share it with an infant!”, and shouts, “Kill! Kill them all!”, bring to mind that modern counterpart to his crime, the abortion holocaust, in which the unborn child, rather than being loved and cherished, is deemed an inconvenient intruder and an obstacle to self-indulgence, worthy only of being erased from the ledgers of a hedonistic society.
The moment of nightfall on Christmas Eve has many traditions attached to it. In Poland families carefully watch for the first sight of a star in the evening sky as the signal to begin their Christmas Eve supper. In the Gascony region of France, every hearth fire and light in the village with the sole exception of the sanctuary lamp of the tabernacle in the parish church would be extinguished before sunset, to be relit at nightfall from torches kindled by the sanctuary lamp’s flame. Such observances stem from the perception of the night of Christmas Eve as a time of grace so sacred that its very arrival is ceremoniously observed.
Persecution And
Window Candles
In Ireland, the night shadows of Christmas Eve are pierced by the light of candles, real or otherwise, in the windows of each home — lights laden with religious symbolism. The traditional explanation for these candles is that they are an invitation to the Holy Family wandering in the night to come and visit the home.
In connection with this the Irish have also had a custom of leaving a door unlocked on the holy night and setting a table for the anticipated three “guests.” But there is a lot more to the story of the window candles, and it all has to do with the Mass.
During the centuries of anti-Catholic persecution imposed by the English Protestant regime upon the Irish, when Catholic priests were compelled to live as outlaws, Mass could only be celebrated in secret. Sometimes these Masses would take place in remote reaches of the mountains and forests, but also within the hidden confines of Catholic homes.
A sense of what Irish Catholics were up against in their battle to keep the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in their land can be gleaned from the following “Declaration Against Transubstantiation” that by a 1691 statute was demanded of anyone in Ireland taking any civil office:
“I [name] do solemnly and sincerely in the presence of God profess, testify, and declare, that I do believe that in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper there is not any transubstantiation of the elements of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, at or after the consecration thereof, by any person whatsoever; and that the invocation or adoration of the virgin Mary, or any other saint, and the sacrifice of the Mass, as they are now used in the church of Rome, are superstitious and idolatrous” (English Statute 3 William and Mary, chapter 2, section 5, in Danby Pickering, ed., The Statutes at Large, vol. 9, 1764, p. 131).
A subsequent 1697 statute imposed devastating fines upon anyone who dared to harbor “popish clergy,” and at the third such “offense” the confiscation of all his lands and property (9 William III chapter 1, sections 4-5). And thus on Christmas Eve it was up to one particularly courageous Catholic family in each community to host the Christmas midnight Mass under their roof.
So great was the danger of discovery that the identity of the particular house for Mass was not revealed until shortly before Mass-time, when as a signal to the priest and the other Catholics a single candle was lit in one window. Shortly afterward, candles were lit in the windows of all the other Catholic homes so as to conceal from hostile spectators the meaning of the first candle.
If any probing questions were asked as to what the candles were for, the Irish Catholics had a ready answer — the aforementioned offer of hospitality to the Holy Family. But this “cover story” was not a lie, for the candle was indeed an invitation to Christ in the person of the priest and in the Sacrament of the Altar to come to the home.
As we celebrate Christmas Eve this year, let us do all we can to make it sacred, remembering all that those who have gone before us did to make this a truly holy night.
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