Home » Languages » English (Sr. Secondary) » Essay, Paragraph, Speech on “Christmas” Long, Short Essay for School, College Students, essay for Class 8, 9, 10, 12 and Competitive Exams

Essay, Paragraph, Speech on “Christmas” Long, Short Essay for School, College Students, essay for Class 8, 9, 10, 12 and Competitive Exams

Christmas

For Christians the feast of Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Christ. Its popularity the world over has suffered much and has been distorted by artificiality from the commercial world. For the uninitiated it is a time full of loud, complacent, ribald, care-free people who shake hands, slap one another on the back and lift their tankards in a merry shibboleth ; “All the best and happy days !” to the chink of mugs and hollow laughter. The artificial Christmas crib, sprinkled over with artificial snow and artificial light, and artificial silver and gold trimmings is totally destructive of the hare, stark and mortifying truth of the great feast. What is worse are the artificial ideas, especially the romantic ideas that we associate with the naked but sublime facts of the Christmas story.

When we study the absolute beggary of the Christmas Cave where Christ was born and its attendant circumstances, we find no time to indulge in romantic trivialities. For those who know its secret know how its reality has been all but shattered and soiled with artificiality, by a commercialism that knows not the real meaning of Christmas. The Christmas Feast is not a time to soothe and flatter our complacency, if we look squarely at its reality. Ever since the great Francis of Assisi gave the Crib to the world, men have wrongly come to think of Bethlehem merely as a picture of soft, sweet-smelling straw and star-dust, of shepherds and angels and kings, a beautiful Babe and beneficent peace. The home that Joseph and Mary had to improvise was a stable or a cave in one of the hill-sides of Bethlehem. It was not the fantastic cottage that the facile fancy of the Christmas card makers liked to imagine ; roofs bedaubed with red paint and snow-white walls, and a broad funnelled chimney opening to the sky. Actually it was a noisome hole in the shoulder of a hillock where cattle came to feed and moo and bellow in the night. On the rough walls spiders traced their gossamer webs in profusion and the floor lay bespattered with dry dung and straw and barley. Like many, a hovel of today there was not an article of the most primitive furniture in that wretched cave except a small manger that was used for feeding cattle.

A Child in a foul stable

Where the beasts feed and foam,

Only where He was homeless

Are you and I at home.

-G.K. Chesterton

 

In just such an unbelievably destitute place as a wretched cow-shed was the Christ-Child born. Only where He was homeless are you and I at home. Even the poorest of us has a home of sorts with morsels of luxury and comfort to help us face the grim struggle of existence. The stalwart worshippers of Bacchus and Croesus must feel unsupportably humiliated before the Crib in all its unvarnished reality. Such a picture of utter poverty and want is not meant to destroy all the supernatural beauty and profundity of the historical fact of Christmas. If it is meant to teach us anything, it should make us realize things as the naked words of the Gospel story relate the great event of the world’s history and help us to dispense, at least for an hour, with all these commercial trappings, with which an artificial civilisation has learned to treat it as an artificial thing. If it is meant to do anything, it should awaken us from our self-complacency and lethargy and disclose to us the native and imperishable spiritual grandeur of Christmas. Then only may we speak of a real Christmas and invoke a real humanitarianism out of the depths of humanity.

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