Gk Chesterton Christmas Quotes

Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating Christmas before it comes.

If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.

The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

And the beasts of the earth and the birds looked down, In a wild solemnity, On a stranger sight than a sylph or elf, On one man laughing at himself Under the greenwood tree- The giant laughter of Christian men That roars through a thousand tales, Where greed is an ape and pride is an ass, And Jack's away with his master's lass, And the miser is banged with all his brass, The farmer with all his flails; Tales that tumble and tales that trick, Yet end not all in scorning- Of kings and clowns in a merry plight, And the clock gone wrong and the world gone right, That the mummers sing upon Christmas night And Christmas day in the morning.

It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged; God has kept that good wine until not. It is from the backs of the elderly gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst.

All ceremony depends on symbol; and all symbols have been vulgarized and made stale by the commercial conditions of our time...Of all these faded and falsified symbols, the most melancholy example is the ancient symbol of the flame. In every civilized age and country, it has been a natural thing to talk of some great festival on which "the town was illuminated." There is no meaning nowadays in saying the town was illuminated...The whole town is illuminated already, but not for noble things. It is illuminated solely to insist on the immense importance of trivial and material things, blazoned from motives entirely mercenary...It has not destroyed the difference between light and darkness, but it has allowed the lesser light to put out the greater...Our streets are in a permanent dazzle, and our minds in a permanent darkness.

In the same way, we read a great deal about the Spirit of Christmas in modern journalism or commercialism; but it is really a reversal of the same kind. So far from preserving the essentials without the externals, it is rather preserving the externals where there cannot be the essentials. It means taking two mere material substances, like holly and mistletoe, and spreading them all over huge and homeless cosmopolitan hotels or round the Doric columns of impersonal clubs full of jaded and cynical old gentlemen; or in any other place where the actual spirit of Christmas is least likely to be.

Hope means hoping when things are hopeless or it is no virtue at all. It is only when things are hopeless that hope begins to be a strength” (G. K. Chesterton). Hope is an undefeated forward look.

We must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.

All that genuinely remains of the ancient hymns or the ancient dances of Europe, all that has honestly come to us from the festivals of Phoebus or Pan, is to be found in the festivals of the Christian Church. If any one wants to hold the end of a chain which really goes back to the heathen mysteries, he had better take hold of a festoon of flowers at Easter or a string of sausages at Christmas. Everything else in the modern world is of Christian origin, even everything that seems most anti-Christian. The French Revolution is of Christian origin. The newspaper is of Christian origin. The anarchists are of Christian origin. Physical science is of Christian origin. The attack on Christianity is of Christian origin. There is one thing, and one thing only, in existence at the present day which can in any sense accurately be said to be of pagan origin, and that is Christianity.

Christmas is utterly unsuited to the modern world. It presupposes the possibility of families being united, or reunited, and even of the men and women who chose each other being on speaking terms. Thus thousands of young adventurous spirits, ready to face the facts of human life, and encounter the vast variety of men and women as they really are, ready to fly to the ends of the earth and tolerate every alien or accidental quality in cannibals or devil-worshippers, are cruelly forced to face an hour, nay sometimes even two hours, in the society of Uncle George; or some aunt from Cheltenham whom they do not particularly like. Such abominable tortures cannot be tolerated in a time like ours…. It was never supposed that Parents were included in the great democratic abstraction called People. It was never supposed that brotherhood could extend to brothers. G.K.’S WEEKLY (1933)1

Now, a ritual is almost the opposite of a routine. It is because the modern world has missed that point that the modern world has in every other way fallen more and more into routine. The essence of real ritual is that a man does something because it signifies something; it may be stiff or slow or ceremonial in form; that depends on the nature of the artistic form that is used. But he does it because it is significant. It is the essence of routine that he does it because it is insignificant.

Divine mercy over human effort. Today, let us raise our glasses and our voices and our trees and our stockings in honor of the glorious unsuitability of Christmas. Let us savor the sheer irrationality of it. Shout with joy at the blatant absurdity of it. Like all that is of God, it is a blasphemy to the narcissist. An insult to the hedonist. A farce to the self-reliant and self-consumed. Hallelujah. Pour yourself another glass of sherry.

Christmas is a contradiction of modern thought. Christmas is an obstacle to modern progress. Rooted in the past, and even the remote past, it cannot assist a world in which the ignorance of history is the only clear evidence of the knowledge of science. Born among miracles reported from two thousand years ago, it cannot expect to impress that sturdy common sense which can withstand the plainest and most palpable evidence for miracles happening at this moment.

God’s kingdom, we are invited not just to “write poetry,” but to “act” it—not just to be spectators in the story He is telling, but to play a vital role in it.

may we tread and retread the ancient paths of the faith. May we remember what we remember. May we remember why we remember. May remembrance re-member us. May we join with all the saints in the recurrent, everlasting adventure of Christmas.

Christmas is a proclamation that we do not live in a closed universe, but a universe upheld “by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3). As Chesterton expresses in Orthodoxy, “I felt in my bones … that this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation.

The thing is magic, true or false.

The truth is that there is an alliance between religion and real fun, of which the modern thinkers have never got the key, and which they are quite unable to criticize or to destroy. All Socialist Utopias, all new pagan Paradises, promised in this age to mankind have all one horrible fault. They are all dignified…. But being undignified is the essence of all real happiness, whether before God or man. Hilarity involves humility; nay, it involves humiliation…. Religion is much nearer to riotous happiness than it is to the detached and temperate types of happiness in which gentlemen and philosophers find their peace. Religion and riot are very near, as the history of all religions proves. Riot means being a rotter; and religion means knowing you are a rotter.

Religion is interested not in whether a man is happy, but whether he is still alive, whether he can still react in a normal way to new things, whether he blinks in a blinding light or laughs when he is tickled. That is the best of Christmas, that it is a startling and disturbing happiness; it is an uncomfortable comfort.

thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.”3

For God’s sake, may we be jolly.

The great majority of people will . . . keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions. They will continue to do it, and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.

but let us be careful not to confuse sharing with giving. Giving requires something of the giver in a way that sharing does not. Sharing is based on equality, giving on inequality (as Chesterton puts it, “charity certainly means one of two things—pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people

But it has made people weary of the way of proclaiming great things, by perpetually using it to proclaim small things. It has not destroyed the difference between light and darkness, but it has allowed the lesser light to put out the greater.

My own trade … is trained to begin prophesying Christmas somewhere about the beginning of autumn: and the prophecies about it are like prophecies about the Golden Age and the Day of Judgement combined.