If it be lowering & wet on Childermas Day, there will be scarcity; / while if the day be fair, it promises plenty
December 28: Childermas
If it be lowering1 & wet on Childermas Day, there will be scarcity;
while if the day be fair, it promises plentyTraditional
Welcome, friends. I’m Kristin: a Pacific Northwest artist, mom, & farmer offering support for seasonal, local, liturgical living. Together, we’ll explore the agrarian heritage of the Church calendar and ideas of sacred time & sacred place.
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Keeping a liturgical Book of Hours binder helps me to distill all of the inspiration I find, so I can easily look to the elements that have been most nurturing for our family & community.
I have some festive Childermas additions for your liturgical binder! Including a cover page with art emblematic of this feast day, as well as seven pages of prompts, history, poetry, plantlore, meal ideas, scripture connections, and more.
My paid subscribers can find this (as well as lots of other printables) in the Scriptorium:
DIVINE PATTERN
The Christmas season has been opened: and, in crossing that miraculous threshold, we find ourselves in the midst of a mysterious (and downright topsy-turvy) festival of miracles.
In the great feast of the Nativity on December 25, we re-live God’s paradoxical eruption into humanity: infant Jesus, the incarnate deity, is born into a barnyard feeding trough in the bleak midwinter. And this upside-down entrance into our midst sets the pattern for a realignment that God aims to do to our hearts & lives - deepening our surface-level habits of thought, widening our perspectives, straightening our bent souls in the mold of his salvation. He accomplishes all of this through the most surprising means: from the manger to the Cross, Jesus challenges every assumption we’ve taken for granted.
In these days following the Nativity, the Church offers us a pattern of startling Nativity reenactment: a string of feasts manifesting three different facets of martyrdom.2
Martyr in Will & Deed: On December 26, we celebrate St. Stephen…traditionally held to be a deacon and the first Christian martyr, he was stoned to death (Acts 7:54-60).
Martyr in Will, not Deed3: December 27 brings us the feast of St. John, Apostle & Evangelist. Tradition holds that St. John (believed to be the author of the Gospel of John) was imprisoned and tortured, but ultimately lived out his natural lifespan despite his willingness to sacrifice his life.
Martyr in Deed, not Will4: On December 28, we mark Childermas, the feast of the Holy Innocents: infants slain by Herod’s order as he sought out the Christ child (Matthew 2:13-23).
As rays around the source of light
Stream upward ere he glow in sight,
And watching by his future flight
Set the clear heavens on fire;
So on the King of Martyrs wait
Three chosen bands, in royal state,
And all earth owns, of good and great,
Is gather’d in that choir.One [St. Stephen] presses on, and welcomes death:
One [St. John the Evangelist] calmly yields his willing breath,
Nor slow, nor hurrying, but in faith
Content to die or live:
And some [Holy Innocents], the darlings of their Lord,
Play smiling with the flame and sword,
And, ere they speak, to His sure word
Unconscious witness give.John Keble, excerpt from The Christian Year (1887)
At first blush, following the joyful exuberance of Christmas Day with a trio of martyrdom types may seem a bit discordant. We’re not yet at Easter, after all: we just started afresh in our annual calendar cycle of re-enacting the life of Christ, and “Joy to the World” is still ringing in our ears.
But, unsurprisingly, Christmastide is a mystifying season: its contradictions startle us into alertness. We’re smack in the midst of a great festal season - twelve days traditionally set apart for celebration, meals, games - and yet the Church confronts us with a sobering feast of the massacre of the Holy Innocents as part of our celebratory time.
Jesus is born into a feeding trough, and something remarkable is initiated: God has gone searching for us, and the salvation he bears is somehow both a gift already-given and an invitation awaiting our response. On Christmas Day, we proclaim his birth - and in the days following, we learn from three kinds of devoted response to his birth.
We celebrate the birth of Christ, and part & parcel in that birth is death: our participation is a lifegiving demise. The first days of the Christmas season are patterned after Jesus’ topsy-turvy entrance into time, and in them, we’re given varied models for martyrdom - models for the witness to this miracle. Whoever loses his life will save it.
“Rightly are they called The Flowers of the Martyrs, for they grew in the mid-winter of infidelity, as the first buds of the Church, and, being nipped by the frost of persecution, filled the city of Bethlehem with a ruddy stream. They were Babes, and could not speak; yet did they joyfully proclaim the praise of the Lord.”
Dom Prosper Gueranger’s quotation of an excerpt from the Mozarabic Missal, as recorded in The Liturgical Year (1851)
Childermas, celebrating the witness of the Holy Innocents, is simultaneously a joyful Christmastide feast and a somber day of purple vestments and tolling bells. It’s not a trope, not a nicety employed to put a bow on a devastating massacre: we mourn, we celebrate, and all the while, we steep ourselves in the reality of God-With-Us.
The Childermas traditions of generations past brought this paradoxical feast to life in tangible ways through role reversal. Choirboys were elected as “Boy Bishops,” and they would preach, bless parishioners, and preside over Vespers. Some parishes tasked their Childermas Boy Bishop with the duty of finding rushes for the upcoming Epiphany service, giving him a key role in preparing the church for one of the biggest celebrations of the year.
Christmastide - celebrating God’s presence birthed into our form - reorders everything. In the antics of putting a young boy at the helm of the day’s liturgical duties, that reordering is brought to the fore in a playful way. We can toll the bell in mourning and simultaneously feast & play.
ROOTS & BRANCHES
Here on the farm, Childermas arrives at a quiet time when the soil in the fields is doing its silent work, but we’re not harvesting and not yet actively preparing for the coming season.
I imagine it’s a rhythm not unlike that of older agrarian communities during Christmastide; work was set aside to allow for play, and, after all, the limited daylight & colder temperatures forced a time of waiting before digging into a new growing season.
Most of the agricultural traditions we have from Childermas are related to weather predictions: our forebears looked into the Childermas sky and tried to see in it some glimpse of the coming season.
It was a day set aside - not to rush headlong into new work or to-do lists or tasks (indeed, it was considered unlucky to start any new ventures on Childermas day), but to sit in patient paradox and keep one eye on the horizon. To witness.
A wooded hillside borders the western edge of our farm - some old-growth cedar trees still remain, as well as an ever-changing cast of characters throughout the seasons: snowberry, salmonberry, Pacific blackberry, huckleberry, ferns galore.... This time of year, of course, the evergreens are most striking, though.
Over a century ago, when lumberjacks worked these same woods, giant cedar trees were felled; they would carve a notch into a massive trunk, place a springboard in the notch to stand on, and then saw a wedge into the trunk to fell it.
A number of these decayed stumps still remain in the woods here, scarred with springboard notches. But growing out of almost each felled stump is a cedar shoot - a child tree, growing from that fallen giant. These younger trees are accompanied by licorice fern and moss, and seem a bit like a reordering of the tree’s death. The stumps that they grow from still continue to slowly decompose, even while the saplings spring up.
Walking through the woods again the other day, these felt like Childermas trees - each one evoking both mourning and dancing. I’m not speaking in terms of reductionist platitudes here: suffering, loss, grief, pain…all of these matter, and all of them are devastating. The loss of the Holy Innocents was an incomprehensible tragedy.
But Jesus comes as both the root and the branch5: the Alpha and Omega, the progenitor and descendant all at once. He inspires the Church to live out this mystery: to take devastation and spur vibrancy from it. And so Childermas sits in a place of honor, a tragic loss flanking the celebration of the birth of God.
It doesn’t take away the pain or mourning: in fact, the Church asks us to continue to hold these things. But the mourning, standing alone, is incomplete. The Church also invites us to celebrate amidst it: to remember the pain and loss tangibly, while also remembering that the context into which it is placed is one of redemption. Suffering is not glossed over: it’s folded into a context of triumph.
One of our classic Christmas carols is, in fact, a lullaby of mothers to these Holy Innocents:
Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
Thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay?”Herod the king, in his raging,
Chargèd he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All young children to slay.That woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and may
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”Coventry Carol (earliest recorded text via Robert Coo, 15th c.)
How often do we hear that tune during the Christmas season, not realizing that it lifts up the Holy Innocents into our midst with every repetition?
BENEDICTION
ALL hail! ye infant Martyr flowers
Cut off in life's first dawning hours:
As rosebuds snapt in tempest strife,
when Herod sought your Savior's life.
You, tender flock of lambs, we sing,
first victims slain for Christ your King:
beside the very altar, gay
with palms and crowns, ye seem to play.
All honor, laud, and glory be,
o Jesu, Virgin-born to Thee;
all glory, as is ever meet,
To Father and to Paraclete.Excerpt of Salvete, Flores Martyrum from Prudentius’ Cathemerinon (ca. 405 AD), trans. Hugh Thomas Henry & M. Neale
Childermas is a complicated day, and thankfully the Church asks us to lean into that complication, not deny it. To be faithful witnesses to all its contours.
A few years ago, a dear friend lost her newborn infant, not long before Christmas Day: she told me how thankful she was that Childermas was a time set aside to hold her sorrow within the context of Christmastide.
Whatever you face this Christmas season, I pray that you find solace in this set-aside time: that you would find a way to fully hold pain, while fully embracing the miraculous birth of God-With-Us.
“And while [Herod] thus persecutes Christ, he furnished an army [of martyrs] clothed in white robes of the same age as the Lord.”
St. Augustine, quoted in the Catena Aurea by St. Thomas Aquinas
Wishing you the beautifully complex peace of Christmastide, friends!
Pax et bonum,
Kristin
P.S. As a festive Christmastide event, author & culinary historian Brigitte Webster will be joining us to chat about Tudor Twelfth Night traditions - would you like to join in the conversation?
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A threatening, dark sky
The word “martyr” is derived from a Greek legal term: μάρτυς (martus), a witness in a court of law. From this, we get the ecclesastical understanding of “martyr” - a witness holding fast to faith in Christ, even to the point of death.
“And as Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the twelve disciples aside, and on the way he said to them, ‘See, we are going up to Jerusalem. And the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified, and he will be raised on the third day.’
“Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came up to him with her sons [James & John], and kneeling before him she asked him for something. And he said to her, ‘What do you want?’ She said to him, ‘Say that these two sons of mine are to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.’ Jesus answered, ‘You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?’ They said to him, ‘We are able.’” (Matthew 20:17-22 ESV)
See Rationale Divinorum Officiorum by William Durandus (13th c. AD)
I think that because the death of a child is almost always unexpected and shocking in first world societies today, it’s all too easy to get the “ick” from Childermas. However, I try to put myself in the place of a medieval or early modern parent who had to expect losing a child as a likely and normal part of parenthood… How comforting it must have been to have this feast as a reminder of the cohorts of little saints waiting in heaven since the era of Jesus’ birth.
First of all, I never knew the backgrounds to the delicate beauty of the Coventry Carol, a favourite of mine from when I was in a choir in High School. It did always strike me as we sang it, how soft and delicate it was. As a mother and grandmother now, I can see why. Thank you for illuminating it. Secondly, Iris and I read a little Bible book called The Happy Search only this morning and it had Herod in it, glowering and lying about his desire to worship the Baby King. Iris was horrified that he wanted to kill Baby Jesus but I am still glad that this was in the story. She could sense in her innocence that he was a bad man and that suffering would come if The Three Wise Men told him where the manger was.