Your Post-Christmas Day Moment of Joy

 

While most in the West were celebrating Hanukkah or Christmas or simply being killjoys, others were just killing:

ISIS released a video purporting to show it killing 11 Christian men in Nigeria, saying it was part of a campaign to avenge the deaths of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and its spokesman.

(Sidebar: this ISIS.)

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Boko Haram and its IS-affiliated Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) faction have recently stepped up attacks on military and civilian targets.

"They killed seven people and abducted a teenage girl in the attack," local vigilante David Bitrus said.

"They took away food stuff and burnt many houses before leaving," he said, adding that a church was also burnt.

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Fourteen persons were injured in a grenade explosion at around 6 p.m. Sunday along Sinsuat Avenue near the entrance of Pedro Colina Hill and a few meters from the Immaculate Conception Cathedral.

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Hong Kong anti-government protesters marched through Christmas-decorated shopping centres on Wednesday, chanting pro-democracy slogans and forcing one mall to close early, as police fired tear gas to disperse crowds gathering on nearby streets.

The protests have turned more confrontational over the festive season, though earlier in December they had been largely peaceful after pro-democracy candidates overwhelmingly won district council elections.

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While we see Christmas trees on every corner, persecuted believers might not ever see a single Christmas decoration. If they do, it’s only in a secret celebration because in several countries, Christmas is illegal and banned outright. Any Christmas celebration carries with it the potential for fines, arrest and imprisonment.

I suppose Boxing Day sales and stupid movies on TV matter more than slaughter and oppression.




Nevertheless, Christmas - past and present - is wrought with gifts of all kinds:

The Christmas of 1552 could hardly have been more different from the Christmases we know today. Familiar Yuletide iconography — Christmas trees, reindeers, mistletoe and the like — was not yet established anywhere in the world (and, naturally, there was not a whiff of the commercialism that marks modern-day Christmas festivities.) The setting for this Christmas was the abandoned Daido-ji Buddhist temple, converted into the Jesuits’ house of worship and living quarters. It would be among the first of Japan’s nanban-dera, or southern barbarian temples, the name given to the makeshift Christian churches housed in Buddhist buildings, with shoji and engawa (a type of terrace) and, often the sole exterior visual difference, a cross erected upon the kawara roof tiles.

On Christmas Eve, Japanese believers were invited to spend the night in the Jesuit living quarters, cramming the venue as they embarked upon an all-nighter of hymns, sermons, scripture readings and Masses. For today’s readers, at least, de Alcacova’s account comes across as a rather gruelling experience, although there’s no reason to doubt the missionary’s numerous references to the “great joy” of the Japanese converts. From dusk until dawn, the new converts were treated to sermons and readings about “Deus” — the Portuguese word for God. The entire celebration contained no fewer than six Masses.

Father Juan Fernandez, an important Jesuit who wrote the West’s first lexicon of Japanese, opened the midnight scripture sessions. When his voice grew weary, he was relieved by “a Japanese youth with knowledge of our language,” de Alcacova writes. At the crack of dawn, Cosme de Torres — leader of the Jesuit mission after Xavier’s departure for India — led a new Mass, while another priest read passages from the gospels and the Epistles. After this night of Christian immersion, the faithful were allowed to go home, likely exchanging greetings of “Natala” — the Portuguese word for Christmas, meaning “birth.”

That was not the end, however. For soon the Japanese converts were back for more, attending yet another Mass, and listening to sermons about the Creation and the life of Christ.

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It was Christmas Day in 1950, and this was no ordinary birth.

The mother was one of 14,000 North Korean refugees crammed into a US merchant marine ship, fleeing the advancing guns of the Chinese army. 

There was barely enough room on board to stand - and there wasn't much medical equipment, either.

"The midwife had to use her teeth to cut my umbilical cord," Lee Gyong-pil tells me some 69 years on. "People said the fact that I didn't die and was born was a Christmas miracle."

Mr Lee was the fifth baby born on the SS Meredith Victory that winter, during some of the darkest days of the Korean War. 

The Meredith Victory's three-day voyage saved thousands of lives, including the parents of the current President of South Korea, Moon Jae-in. 

It also earned the cargo freighter a nickname - the Ship of Miracles.

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The first Lessons and Carols was in 1918, and Cleobury conducted more than a third of them, his last being the centennial anniversary a year ago. The original service, blending the biblical stories of Christ’s coming at Bethlehem with traditional Christmas carols, was conceived as a moment of unity and peace after the horrors of the Great War, only six weeks concluded at Christmas 1918.

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In the days after 39-year-old Tony Belt — a father of three and Purple Heart recipient who served overseas in the Army Infantry — fell 18 feet from a scissor lift at work on Sept. 26, doctors gave his family “pretty much no hope,” his wife, Kyli Belt, tells Yahoo Lifestyle.

“They brought in the organ donation team, the palliative care team,” she recalls. “They made me explain to my kids that daddy was going to heaven.

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Kyli, from Missouri City, Iowa, says she was encouraged to set a DNR [do not resuscitate] order as her husband lay in a coma, hooked up to a ventilator.

But Kyli noticed that Tony was initiating his own breaths — and last week, he had a major breakthrough. With just days to go before Christmas, Tony started opening his eyes and is now communicating with his loved ones via hand gestures and, as of this Tuesday, mumbled words. It’s a development his son Eli predicted.

“Since the beginning, he’s the only one who never gave up hope,” Kyli says of the boy. “He told me that daddy was going to be awake and talking on Christmas Eve — and tomorrow’s Christmas Eve, and here he is today, turning his voice back on and saying yes and no.

“It was just his will,” she continued, in reference to Tony’s persistence.

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A century-old cross that was stolen from a church in Digby, N.S., was returned, undamaged, in a Christmas Eve miracle, says the town’s mayor.