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| Allegedly the oldest mass-produced Christmas card, circa 1843 |
Although the Gregorian calendar we now use was decreed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, until the mid- 1700s many Protestant countries like England (quite fittingly) protested taking orders from a Catholic pope, and kept celebrating Christmas on December 25 according to the Julian calendar, which was January 6 by their new, and our current Gregorian calendar. Once the new calendar was implemented in England, some disgruntled citizens even took to the streets demanding they be given back their "lost" days.
The Julian-style celebration of Christmas may not have taken wide hold here in the United States, but pockets of settlers -- including Amish in the northeast and English and Scotch-Irish settlers trickling down the Appalachians -- were celebrating Old Christmas before "new Christmas" was en vogue.
There was an old man at my home church who was nicknamed Blue. He died about 15 years ago (he'd be about 100 years old today), but when he was alive he could remember from childhood, his family celebrating Old Christmas. Christmas celebrations, although similar in spirit, can vary greatly by culture and time. Maybe it's too late to talk about them, but . . . it is Old Christmas, and my decorations are still up My dad says the first family Christmas tree he could remember, was out in the yard and strung helter-skelter with one string of lights. As a child my grandmother was excited to receive an orange and nuts in her (own, used) stocking on Christmas Day. In Little House in the Big Woods, the first book in the Little House on the Prairie series, Caroline "Ma" Ingalls receives a most-cherished Christmas gift from her sister: a clove-studded "pomander" apple.
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| Try giving this as a Christmas gift today. Then again, it might work! |
Of course, after Christmas comes New Year's Day. But before that may come the making of resolutions, another fun tradition already in motion, and also, for many, a matter of introspection and growth.
Consider the resolve of Jonathan Edwards.
*Resolved, never to do anything out of revenge.
*Resolved, never willfully to omit anything, except the omission be for the glory of God; and frequently to examine my omissions.
*Resolved, to maintain the strictest temperance in eating and drinking.
*Resolved, to inquire every night, before I go to bed, whether I have acted in the best way I possibly could, with respect to eating and drinking. Jan. 7, 1723.
*Resolved, that I will live so as I shall wish I had done when I come to die.
*Resolved, that I will not give way to that listlessness which I find unbends and relaxes my mind from being fully and fixedly set on religion, whatever excuse I may have for it-that what my listlessness inclines me to do, is best to be done, etc. May 21, and July 13, 1723.
The heading of Edwards's Diary read:
Being sensible that I am unable to do anything without God’s help, I do humbly entreat him by his grace to enable me to keep these Resolutions, so far as they are agreeable to his will, for Christ’s sake.
Remember to read over these Resolutions once a week.
Surely a man of Jonathan Edwards's stature kept all his resolutions with aplomb and steely discipline. Though more surely, Jonathan Edwards was a man who knew his standing before a just God.
An excerpt from Edwards's Diary regarding the keeping of Resolutions reads:
The last week I was sunk so low, that I fear it will be a long time before I am recovered. I fell exceedingly low in the weekly account [regarding keeping my resolutions]. I find my heart so deceitful, that I am almost discouraged from making any more resolutions. — Wherein have I been negligent in the week past; and how could I have done better, to help the dreadful low estate in which I am sunk?
Edwards kept making and striving toward resolutions despite his acknowledged lack of any organic ability within himself to sustain them. His Diary entry from January 2, 1722, reads:
I find, by experience, that, let me make resolutions, and do what I will, with never so many inventions, it is all nothing, and to no purpose at all, without the motions of the Spirit of God . . . . There [must be] no dependence on myself. Our resolutions may be at the highest one day, and yet, the next day, we may be in a miserable dead condition, not at all like the same person who resolved. So that it is to no purpose to resolve, except we depend on the grace of God. For, if it were not for his mere grace, one might be a very good man one day, and a very wicked one the next.
As for me, I have not made 70 resolutions; but I think I could. I think there are 70 or more points of life in which I lack wisdom and discipline and reverence for God. Although I have as much a shot as Jonathan Edwards had at living up to just one resolution by my own will, it is the same grace that sustained Jonathan Edwards, that sustains every member of His church today and which gives each member the heart to know that the worship of God is truly the end of all means, in Heaven and on earth.
Happy Old Christmas and New Year! May our list of resolutions be long, and in every mortal matter without dependence on the grace of God, may we feel as helpless and dead as Jonathan Edwards felt when he broke his own resolutions.
(For he saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.) -2 Corinthians 6:2.
