Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Swords for Christmas

I guess all sorts of things are given as Christmas presents – things that seem to me unimaginably off-centre in relation to the point of Christmas as a feast celebrating the birth of Christ.

You could make a case for giving swords though, if you had a mind. They might remind the person who received them of Herod’s extremely nasty use of them in the follow-up to the Christmas tale, when his soldiers were sent to execute the male children under two who lived in Bethlehem. Bethlehem: the town that had harboured Jesus at his birth was to suffer for this hospitality (though admittedly it was a rather back-handed hospitality, in view of Jesus was actually born).

So swords for Christmas, eh? Perhaps a little off-the-wall, but not entirely!

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