Christmas is not over
We have forgotten our ancient calendar
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It is both amusing and sad seeing Christmas decorations taken down now. Christmas began Dec. 24. It runs through January 6 ("the 12 days of Christmas"). People mistake Advent for Christmas.
The old calendar went further and had Christmas ending February 2, on Candlemas, which takes place forty days after Christmas Day, marking the Presentation of the Child Jesus in the Temple (according to the Mosaic covenantal law of the dedication to God of the first-born son), which America has dumbed down and secularized as "Groundhog Day."
The ordering of time, by means of its etherealized rhythm, exercises a subtle influence over our mind and spirit, for good or ill.
The ancient Church kept a calendar we've forgotten (cf. Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year). Workers had many more festive days for R & R in the "Dark Ages" than today. Elon and Vivek might object.
In post-modernism's ant hill society people are drone bees working constantly to "engineer the future." Those who dissent are held to be semi-literate rubes compared with all the geniuses from the Far East. There is no place now for Thoreau, Wordsworth, William Blake, Thomas Gray or any other poet-dreamer in the world of the self-described tech engineers. Their work model is Asia.
They forget that the America they claim to cherish was built on Christian values, in agricultural time, that sustained both crops and large families.
Ennobled people seek days of sabbath rest and contemplation, in which to “redeem the time.” Those days were formerly reserved for all, not just "high achievers" and the wealthy.
Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" could not have been penned in a culture that mistook contemplative life for loafing, or a failure to measure up to ambitious immigrant go-getters from India and China.
In the 19th century Thomas de Quincy opined that human life had little value in Asia, where man was but "a weed." What is the value of the life of the individual in India or China today?
It is the Jeffersonian concept of the human being as God's image-bearing creature, endowed with rights from the Creator, not from any ruler or government which is the philosophy which built America and molded us as a people. We're getting away from that understanding in pursuit of high tech, and living on Mars. How much of our humanity is being sacrificed here in America to achieve the prophesied techno-utopia?
To what extent will the American rural working class be colonized by new arrivals from foreign lands where passing academic tests, doing calculus and climbing the career ladder is the measure of a human being?
I went to school with the generation that put two men on the moon in 1969. We had a state-of-the-art science lab in our new middle school, yet we also had English teachers devoted to cultivating our souls with the canonical literature of the West, and history teachers grounding us in the memory of the founding spirit of America.
With that grounding some of us proceeded to college and afterward, for a few years, we wandered "in the backroads by the rivers of...memory," in the words of John Hartford, to find ourselves.
If engage in that quest now do we risk being branded as backward American losers unfit for competing with Third World dynamos?
The yardstick being used to judge and disparage native-born Americans is artificial. It is contrived by authoritarian personalities who prescribe the measure of what constitutes success. I reject their measurement.
I celebrate the traditional American spirit of the working man and woman, and the unions they formed to fight for an eight hour day, a 40 hour week, overtime pay, a living wage and health care and pension benefits — militating against regimentation and oppression by plutocrats, who insisted that their vision was the higher one that must be adopted by society as a whole.
I will never submit to a techno-aristocracy. I reject the rise of a royal class in America.
Read Ramp Hollow by Steven Stoll (better by far than J.D. Vance's book, which is filled with his scorn for the people of Appalachia).
In the twentieth century Appalachian folks lost the battle with rapacious capitalists. Mr. Stoll demonstrates that the defeat did not signal they were unfit to take their place in an ascendant America. Rather, it showed that they were unnaturally held back by oppressors who were moral reprobates who thought of themselves as John Galt-type supermen.
Merry Christmas!
FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF KNOWLEDGE CONTRA CANCEL CULTURE
Michal Hoffman is the author of They Were White and They were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America and nine other books of history and prose.
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Revisionist historian Michael Hoffman explores the ascendance of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic-Kabbalistic mind virus in his book The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome. He explicates the alchemical processing of humanity in Twilight Language. He is the author of eight other volumes of history and literature including Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, as well as Usury in Christendom, Judaism Discovered, and Adolf Hitler: Enemy of the German People. Michael has written extensive introductions to Alexander McCaul’s The Talmud Tested, Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s Traditions of the Jews, and The 1582 Rheims New Testament.
He is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press and a former paid consultant to the news department of the New York Times. Michael’s books have been published in translation in Japanese and French. Listen to his broadcasts on his Revisionist History® podcast, and find him on X (Twitter).
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Katya here. I am so delighted by the thought of leaving our Christmas lights outside until Candlemas! And where else to begin? There are so many places. In our very depressed neck of the woods on the high plains abandoned by the "economy" of the last many decades, we went grocery shopping at Walmart yesterday with our grandchild. Mind you, there are no choices here on the Oregon Trail and Walmart carries "organic" food. My granddaughter and I sing the Twelve Days of Christmas every day, and yesterday was " 6 geese a laying" as loud as we could in the aisles of such sad looking people. We played such a clever game of hide and seek from Grandpa with the cart that we brought smiles to faces that looked as if they had forgotten how to smile. Where to begin? To keep love and life and singing in our children, no matter the hardships. Home should be the loving and joyful heart of learning. As for our public schools, the children badly need foster grandparents, they are so starved of love, along with good food.
The anti-Christian forces all around us would rush us along towards goals that have come to seem normal. The Scrooge at the heart of our Woke, globalist agenda is very stingy of love, of hope, of time to play, of time to learn, of love, of joy -- so let us look strange to our neighbors, let us take open joy in the dark days of Christmastide. And may our open giving of time and love to those who need us most be ever ready and generous. Ignore the propaganda as best you can, and give love, life, play and learning to the children. And we are all children.
To Theresa I would say remember and strengthen your dream; maybe we'll avert bad times to come.
Another reading recommendation: Dickens' Hard Times, his shortest novel. Unfortunately what he describes is the system we have adopted today in our schools, businesses, and in our moral lives (most churches).
Excellent essay! Absolutely: we must reconsecrate time for precious contemplation, allowing examination of self, of nature, of time itself, cultivating an awareness of our very humanity. The cri de coeur... "We are not machines!" ... must now go further: We are human, and we must reclaim and champion what makes us fully human. This is our challenge going forward. Thank you, Mr. Hoffman. Merry Christmas!