Orthodox Christmas

 Serbian Orthodox Christmas

I missed the Orthodox celebration of Christmas this year. I also missed the earlier celebration that comes in December according to the Gregorian calendar. 

My mother passed on just two days before the start of Childermastide...

(December 12, that is. Using the Gregorian calendar I calculate the start of Childermastide - which is the time or tide of the killing of Holy Innocent Children - starting on the eve of December 14th - when the children of Newtown were killed - and extending through December 28th, which day is the proper Childermas, or Feast of the Holy Innocents.)

... and I just never had my heart in the season; the first time in more than 3 score years I had ignored the time of year.

My daughter had a tree and decorations, and my wife and I did attend services at Holy Trinity in Washington, D.C.  It is a Jesuit church and St. Ignatius was mentioned in the sermon, and I started thinking about his works, thinking that I must read up a bit on him.

 Orthodox Christmas in the West Bank, Bethlehem

 Celebration in Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral

The Christmas season is sort of my personal view of a complex Coherence, in which all human behaviors do not necessarily agree and coincide, our views may differ - even differ drastically - and we may emphasize the spiritual or the material...

Some people use the season as part of their political ideology, such as condemning some vague monstrous group's "War on Christmas" and stirring up the dullwitted troops with their usurpation of the word "Christmas"... a form of lèse-majesté, I should think.

Celebrating in Lviv, Ukraine

In our celebrations, there is no true, no false, only the behaviors of joy and spiritual exaltation.

In this is the coherence.

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