Another Merry Christmas

I hope that you are all having a peaceful, joyful and very merry Christmas. And since this is Christmas day, it would be most unfair to not post a Chesterton quote for Christmas when GKC is such a champion of Christmas and this blogg in Chesterteens. So anyways, from The Everlasting Man two old and incredible favorites:


"The hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle."

"Unless we understand the presence of that enemy, we shall not only miss the
point of Christianity, but even miss the point of Christmas. Christmas for us in
Christendom has become one thing, and in one sense even a simple thing. But
like all the truths of that tradition, it is in another sense a very complex thing.
Its unique note is the simultaneous striking of many notes; of humility, of
gaiety, of gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and of drama. It is
not only an occasion for the peacemakers any more than for the merry-makers;
it is not only a Hindu peace conference any more than it is only a
Scandinavian winter feast. There is something defiant in it also; something that
makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a battle that has
just been won. All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas
atmosphere only hangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or
fading vapour from the exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills
nearly two thousand years ago. But the savour is still unmistakable, and it is
something too subtle or too solitary to be covered by our use of the word
peace. By the very nature of the story the rejoicings in the cavern were
rejoicings in a fortress or an outlaw's den; properly understood it is not unduly
flippant to say they were rejoicings in a dug-out. It is not only true that such a
subterranean chamber was a hiding-place from enemies; and that the enemies
were already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a sky. It is not only
that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that sense have passed like
thunder over the sunken head of Christ. It is also that there is in that image a
true idea of an outpost, of a piercing through the rock and an entrance into an
enemy territory. There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the
world; of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as Herod the great
king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace."

N.B. The chapter entitled The God in the Cave, is a perfect Christmas reading. On the pdf version that chapter starts somewhere around page 110. Enjoy!