Such is the Christmas of popular tradition,
the Nativity as it is reflected in the carols, the cradle-rocking, the
mystery plays of the later Middle Ages. This |27| Christmas, which
still lingers, though maimed, in some Catholic regions, is strongly
life-affirming; the value and delight of earthly, material things is
keenly felt; sometimes, even, it passes into coarseness and riot. Yet a
certain mysticism usually penetrates it, with hints that this dear life,
this fair world, are not all, for the soul has immortal longings in her.
Nearly always there is the spirit of reverence, of bowing down before the
Infant God, a visitor from the supernatural world, though bone of man's
bone, flesh of his flesh. Heaven and earth have met together; the rough
stable is become the palace of the Great King.
This we might well call the "Catholic" Christmas, the Christmas of the
age when the Church most nearly answered to the needs of the whole man,
spiritual and sensuous. The Reformation in England and Germany did not
totally destroy it; in England the carol-singers kept up for a while the
old spirit; in Lutheran Germany a highly coloured and surprisingly
sensuous celebration of the Nativity lingered on into the eighteenth
century.
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