Do you realize that the First Session of the First Congress of the United States of America met to do official business on December 25, 1789.
Do you realize that Christmas Day was not declared a Federal holiday until June 26, 1870, principally because of the large number of Catholics who had come to this country from Europe and whose influence in the voting booths was beginning to be recognized?
Yes, the principal "holiday" of celebration in the latter part of a calendar year between 1607, when the first permanent English settlement in what became the thirteen colonies and then the first thirteen states was established in Jamestown, Virginia, and 1870, a period of two hundred sixty-three years, was "thanksgiving day." The date of its observance as an official holiday proclaimed by a sitting president varied widely after the implementation of the Constitution in 1789 until the sixteenth dictator, er, president, Abraham Lincoln, fixed the date in 1863 as the final Thursday in November, which was changed by an act of Congress in 1941 to the fourth Thursday in November. None other than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a thirty-third degree Freemason, had sought the change in order to help store owners make more money before Christmas Day. Some critics of Roosevelt's referred to the change as "Franksgiving."
Regardless of its timing, the American concept of "thanksgiving day," which is not the same as Martinmas (the Feast of Saint Martin of Tours on November 11 that was observed as a Catholic autum festinal in thanksgiving to the true God, the Most Holy Trinity, as He has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His Catholic Church and in honor of the great saint of Tours) has its roots with the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony who, as followers of John Calvin, were desirous of a total separation from the Church of England, which had, they believed, too much of the vestigial trappings of Catholicism (Latin and incense in some of the liturgies, a mock hierarchy and priesthood, belief in some of the sacraments, veneration of some of the saints), were giving thanks to God for having placed them in a land that they believed had not been "polluted" by what they hated most: the Holy Mass.
The irony of this, of course, is that Squanto, the Indian who helped the Pilgrims organized their thanksgiving meal, was Catholic! (For a history of Squanto, see a Novus Ordo-associated website, The True Story of Thanksgiving: Squanto, the Pilgrims, and the Pope.) The first American Thanksgiving, though, took place on September 8, 1565, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in Saint Augustine, Florida. It included a Mass of Thanksgiving offered by Father Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales. The Americas were indeed Catholic and they belonged to Our Lady long before those horrible Catholic-hating, Mass-hating Calvinists, who had particular contempt for the Mother of God, thus placing themselves in full communion with the devil as people to be pitied but never once to extolled for any "contributions" to "American" life whatsoever, arrived here to chart their course in a land where they believed, albeit quite falsely, there had been no "corruption" caused by Catholicism. (For a pictorial contrast between Plymouth Rock and Saint Augustine, Florida, see Plymouth Rock Contrasted with Saint Augustine, Florida.)
The Pilgrims, being Calvinists, although differing from the Puritans, who wanted to "purify" the Anglican sect of Catholic trappings from within (thus it is that the liturgical revolutionaries of conciliarism are really, as I wrote in The Remnant on January 31, 2003, the "New Puritans" in their efforts to eradicate high altars, replacing any kind of altar with tables, eliminating the communion rail, placing the "presider" on a level of equality with the congregation giving the laity more roles in the liturgy and taking away the steps leading up to the table, a stress on the liturgy as a "meal" or a "banquet" rather than a propitiatory sacrifice for sins, the very unbloody re-presentation or perpetuation of the ineffable and august Sacrifice of the Cross, the removal of statues, the elimination of devotions, etc.), were an ignorant lot of men. They had been convinced by the devil himself that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was his instrument, nothing other than a work of sacrilegious superstition. Thus it is that they hated the Mass and thus they hated Christmas Day as, ignorant though they were, that the word Christmas meant "Christ's Mass," and they wanted noting to do with that.
Ah, those pathetic creatures of Plymouth Colony, men and women who must never be praised by Catholics (we were once heard a fully traditional Catholic priest discourse rhapsodically in a sermon about how much they loved God, words of utter ignorance of fact that I had the same sort of sickening feeling when hearing it spew forth from the mouths of priests and presbyters in the conciliar church), were a little late. Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's Holy Mass had made Its way to the shores of what became the United States of America fifty-five years before they set foot on dry land on December 11, 1620, having been offered by Father Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales upon the arrival of Spanish colonists near Saint Augustine, Florida, on September 8, 1565, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our Lord was here in the Most Blessed Sacrament long before the purest of the Puritans arrived on these shores.
Calvinism, which is really warmed over Judaism with a slightly Christian gloss, is at the heart and soul of life here in the United States of America. It drives our economy. It drives our politics. It drives the very life of men as they strive for earthly treasures and career successes as trophies to display to others just how "good" and "important" they are, how "meaningful" their lives are, what an "inspiration" their "success stories" should be to other men, creatures who are not worked and accomplished and achieved what they have. And, in the conjunction with the naturalistic spirit of Judeo-Masonry it helped to spawn to which it gave much of its demonic spirit, Calvinism has succeeded, after over a century of exploiting the Advent season prior to Christmas Day for commercial success that serves as a barometer of national economic health for the following calendar year, in eclipsing Christmas Day with the hideous Judeo-Masonic "thanksgiving day" on which millions upon millions of people of all religions or no religion at all sit around tables and gorge themselves into gluttonous stupors while giving thanks for living in a land of "religious freedom," a land where they can have "freedom of choice" to kill their preborn babies and to enjoy an almost unlimited array of sensual and material pleasures.
The American "thanksgiving day" is day of both celebration and of anticipation, a perverse last day of the secular advent prior to the commencement of what is called "black Friday" (I heard one news report yesterday, Friday, November 28, 2014, a ferial day of the Last Sunday after Penecost and the Feast of Saint Catherine Laboure) and the mad sprees of shopping prior for the celebration of the "holiday" season. People get jostled and and jolted and, as happened a few days ago, pepper-sprayed. Now and again, of course, someone dies in the melees of fighting within John Calvin's circus of markets for this or that material trinket that no one can take with them to Heaven and is bound to be surpassed in relevance and "excitement" by the next gadget or gizmo being sold to make money solely for the sake of making money while ordinary human beings, men and women whose immortal souls have been redeemed by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood the Divine Redeemer, Christ the King, waste their times playing games on computers or hand-held devices and/or worshiping at the altar of the flat-screen televisions. God alone knows how many Catholics have succumbed to this madness as they spend so much time on this earthly distractions in order to "amused" so as avoid what they think is the "monotony" of daily living while neglecting their interior lives of prayer, including praying the family Rosary on their knees every day.
Yes, Christmas Day is still a Federal holiday. References to "Merry Christmas" and "Christmas Day." however, strictly forbidden in most commercial establishments, whose mangers train employees to avoid any mention of the forbidden words lest they be fired summarily. Some commercial establishments are even open on Christmas Day now. After all, not everyone professes the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, right? You've got to cater to them rather than to honor the day on which the long-awaited Messias was born in poverty and humility and anonymity in the cradle in the stable in the cave of Bethlehem, right? Most commercial establishments, including many bakeries and delicatessens, are shuttered on the American "thanksgiving day" as many people stay home to prepare to watch football game after football game after football game and others amuse themselves in various and sundry other ways. "Thanksgiving Day" is a day without sectarian boundaries, a day celebrating the Americanist ethos of "e pluribus unum."
The American "thanksgiving day" has thus become the true embodiment of the ethos of religious indifferentism and cultural pluralism, a celebration of family traditions while the traditions of the true Faith have been consigned to the Orwellian memory well both by the forces of Calvinism/Judeo-Masonry and by the liturgical revolutionaries of conciliarism, where it has become a de facto "holy day of obligation" replete with cornucopias around the liturgical tables and its own "Mass propers."
John Calvin could not be happier. We have returned full-circle to the days of his followers of the Seventeenth Century who settled in what became the United States of America. New generations of Americans will now grow up knowing little about Christmas Day even in generic terms while they celebrate "thanksgiving day," which means that they will write of their years as had many Protestants and naturalists of the Nineteenth Century:
The Massachusetts and English Puritans ultimately retracted their total ban on Christmas celebrations. A century later, by the last quarter of the 18th century, some Protestant denominations, including Baptists, slowly began to incorporate Christmas into their religious services. While it was not an official holiday, and while government institutions continued to take no note of it, it became an increasingly popular annual event, albeit for a minority of Americans. Many prominent figures, including the man who was perhaps the 19th century's most famous preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, continued to keep the holiday at arm's length. Thus, in the hundred years after the Revolution, Americans had still not integrated Christmas celebrations into their lives. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Samuel Goodrich, both New Englanders, recalled the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and "training day" as the only "great festivals" of their childhood in the early 19th century. "An 80-year-old New Yorker wrote that in 1818 his boarding school allowed only two week-long vacations, plus the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, during the entire year. Christmas and New Year's Day were ignored." "The Youth's Friend, an American Sunday School Union magazine for children, did not mention Christmas as anything more than a date until 1846. (Obviously, that "minority" of Americans were principally Catholics. This summary of the Puritan efforts to ban the celebration of Christmas was exalted by the American Civil Liberties Union as a model for their own efforts, founded in secularism, to do the same. See Puritans & Christmas.)
The life of a Catholic is not supposed to centered around the world's pleasures and the holidays of pagans and heretics and infidels. The life of a Catholic is supposed to centered around the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Yes, the ineffable and august Sacrifice of the Cross is perpetuated in an unbloody manner every time an alter Christus, acting in persona Christi, offers the perfect prayer that is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The same Priest and Victim Who offered Himself up as a propitiation for human sins on the wood of the Holy Cross is offered to the Father in Spirit and in Truth by a mere man whose immortal soul has been forever configured to His own Priesthood and Victimhood. The Mass permits us to be present at the foot of the Cross as we witness the holocaust that our sins imposed upon the God-Man in His Sacred Humanity and at the same the Mass is a foretaste of eternal glories. There is nothing we can do during the course of any day that God has given us from all eternity to live than assisting at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. We must make special efforts, including moving if this is necessary, to assist at the daily offering of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, thereby helping ourselves to see the world more clearly through the eyes of the true Faith and to be more disposed to cooperate with the life-saving graces we receive in Holy Communion, to say nothing of the many fold actual graces that flow out into the world from each and every Mass.
Focusing our lives around the daily offering of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, wherein the solemnity of Calvary and the glories of Heaven are most perfectly and beautifully contained and expressed, prepares us to accept God's Holy Will in our lives, recognizing as we must that there is nothing that we are asked to suffer in this life that is the equal of what one of our least venial sins caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday. Focusing our lives around the daily offering of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, whose calendar contains days on which multiple saints are commemorated so as to call to our attention the cloud of witnesses to the Faith who have gone before us, permits us to learn more about the saints, to prepare ourselves for each and every feast day by reading about the lives of the saints and by praying to them that we may in some small way imitate their heroic virtues.
The Immemorial Mass of Tradition, clearly expressing itself as a sacrifice offered by a sacerdos and beautifully singing the glories of Heaven, is a refuge from the world, not an enshrinement of the world's false, pluralistic, relativistic currents that are part and parcel of the whole ethos of the Novus Ordo Missae under the slogan of "inculturation." The Mass of all ages, therefore, permits us to seek to escape from the cares and the influences of this passing world by reminding us that there is a God Who judges, that it is possible for us to lose our souls for all eternity, that we must plead for God's Mercy without for one second presuming that we will be the beneficiaries of this Mercy at the moment of our Particular Judgments. We escape from the world so as to be cleansed from its many--and at times unseen--consequences in the midst of our daily lives, fortified to do battle with the forces of the world, the flesh, and the devil with hearts that are consecrated totally to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and to the fountain of Divine Mercy that was formed out of the Immaculate Heart, the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Love grows the more that we have contact with the object of our affection. A soul that has contact on a daily basis with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as it was taught by Our Lord Himself to the Apostles grows in his love of the Mass, coming to rue any day when circumstances preclude his assisting at the Sacrifice of the Cross. As God alone--Father, Son, and Holy Ghost--is the object of a soul's Adoration, a love of the Mass, the act in which He is made incarnate anew under the appearances of bread and wine, leads to a greater Adoration of God, more fervent acts of Reparation in union with the action of the Mass itself, a more perfect union with the Petitions offered to the Father through the Son in Spirit and in Truth contained in the Ordinary and Propers of the Mass, and a more steadfast spirit of Thanksgiving for having received the unmerited privilege of being a Roman Catholic and thus having access to the worthy reception of the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man in Our Lady's virginal and immaculate womb. Loving the Mass is the absolute prerequisite to loving God so much that the thought of displeasing Him by the commission of a deliberate mortal sin becomes repugnant, the desire to cleanse oneself in cooperation with the graces received therein to be freed of any attachment to our venial sins.
Each and every day, therefore, is "Thanksgiving Day" for a Catholic. The word Eucharist means thanksgiving. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the fountain of all holiness, permits us to express our own thanks for the gift of the true Faith, for having been given a Blessed Mother, who stands by the foot of her Divine Son's Holy Cross in each Mass just as she did on the first Good Friday, for having been given access to the treasuries contained in the Communion of Saints, making us supplicants of the members of the Church Triumphant and intercessors for the members of the Church Suffering, each of which is present at every Mass. We are given the privilege of partaking of that which is denied to the angels, to taste of the Lord Himself in His Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament. Each day provides us with an opportunity to be present at and to benefit from the ultimate act of Thanksgiving, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Our love for the Immemorial Mass of Tradition stands in sharp contrast with the world's hatred of it. The Protestant Revolt was born in an execrable hatred of the Mass of all ages, reaching its most violent expression in its Calvinist mutations, wherein high altars and statues of Our Lady and the saints were smashed with wicked abandon. The Mass of Tradition is hated by the sons of Modernity, men whose hatred of the Incarnation is such that any reminder of this central fact in human history must be wiped away from social consciousness. Hatred of the Mass of Tradition, therefore, is hatred of the Incarnation itself and contempt for the fact that man needs to rely upon the graces provided therein to sanctity and to save his immortal soul. Modernists within the true Church hate the Mass of Tradition because they do not want to be reminded of their sinfulness and do not want to give God the honor and glory that are His due, having deified themselves and their wicked desires. There is thus quite a diabolical nexus between the spirit of Modernity in the world and that of Modernism in the Church, based as that spirit is in a desire to destroy everything that is authentically Catholic and to replace it with the man's prideful belief in his own salvific abilities.
As Catholics, therefore, we must keep our focus this day and every day on the Thanksgiving of Thanksgivings that is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. We must love hat the Calvinists hate, which is why the true national holiday of thanksgiving in this country should be the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12 as the miraculous image of herself that she left on Juan Diego's tilma that helped to effect the conversion of over nine million indigenous people in the Americas to the true Faith, the Catholic Faith. Every part of the Americas is meant to be Catholic, including the United States of America.
We must make whatever sacrifices necessary to avail ourselves of the fullest and most perfect expression of the Mass, being grateful to God for having received the grace of Tradition to embrace that which has been jettisoned, out of ignorance by many and out of malice by a few, by so many Catholics in the past forty to fifty years. We must be grateful for the courage of the priests who have embraced the Immemorial Mass of Tradition without any compromise or dilution in order to offer us in the laity that which is our absolute right codified under Quo Primum, which merely expresses the actual fact of the matter concerting the immemorial nature of the Traditional Mass of the Roman Rite, unfettered access to the Mass that Our Lord Himself taught the Apostles to say. We must be grateful to Our Lady, to Saint Joseph, to Saints Peter and Paul, and to all of the angels and the saints for being given to see the necessity of eschewing all human respect, including good relations with our family members and the loss of friends in some instances, in order to be fortified in the fountain of holiness that is the Mass of all ages and the fullness of the Faith that It expresses and protects so perfectly.
Catholics should not keep the secular holidays that are meant to enshrine things antipathetic to the good of souls but to live vibrantly the fullness of the liturgical life of the Church. We should read Dom Prosper Gueranger's moving account of the saint of the day, which on Thursday, November 24, 2011, the sixtieth birthday of this much-hated writer, was Saint John of the Cross great saint, whose restoration of the original Carmelite disciplines was met with great hostility by some of those who belonged to the religious community in which he had been ordained to the Holy Priesthood (Saint Chrysogonus was commemorated four days ago now). We should do this with every single feast day in the calendar of the Church. The statues in our homes must not be the plaster saints of Modernity's belief that the true Faith is irrelevant to social order, but the saints who glory in the fact that they were given the privilege to offer or assist at the Immemorial Mass of Tradition. We must make acts of thanksgiving for having been brought to the baptismal font so as to be able to assist at the Mass ourselves, using the sacred moments of the Consecration of the Host and the wine in the Chalice into the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of the God-Man and the moments after the reception of Holy Communion to return thanks for all that we have been given, including our crosses, which are the means of our sanctification, the means by which we die to self and live more fully the spirit of the Sacrifice of the Mass with every beat of our hearts.
A love of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass leads us to spend time with Our Beloved in His Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament during the course of a day. A love of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass leads us to appreciate the necessity of being totally consecrated to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, becoming instruments of offering up all of our prayers, including the Mass and Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary, and sacrifices and sufferings and humiliations through the Immaculate Heart to the Throne of God Himself. A love of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass leads us to be thankful for every opportunity in our lives to serve Him, unworthy though we are, as instruments who attempt to plant seeds in His vineyard as we make reparation for our sins and sloth.
Far from the spirit of material wealth as a sign of "divine election" that was near and dear to the man, John Calvin, who hated Christmas Day, we should embrace the Holy Poverty of the Holy Family, the Holy Poverty into which the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, having assumed a perfect human nature at the Annunciation, was born on that very same Christmas Day. Listen to the words of Our Lady as found in the Venerable Mary of Agreda's The Mystical City of God:
486. My daughter, if men would keep their heart disengaged and if they would rightly and worthily consider this great sacrament of the kindness of the Most High towards men, it would be a powerful means of conducting them in the pathway of life and subjecting them to the love of their Creator and Redeemer. For as men are capable of reasoning, if they would only make use of their freedom to treat this sacrament with the reverence due to its greatness, who would be so hardened as not to be moved to tenderness at the sight of their God become man, humiliated in poverty, despised, unknown, entering the world in a cave, lying in a manger surrounded by brute animals, protected only by a poverty-stricken Mother, and cast off by the foolish arrogance of the world? Who will dare to love the vanity and pride, which was openly abhorred and condemned by the Creator of heaven and earth in his conduct? No one can despise the humility, poverty and indigence, which the Lord loved and chose for Himself as the very means of teaching the way of eternal life. Few there are, who stop to consider this truth and example: and on account of this vile ingratitude only the few will reap the fruit of these great sacraments.
487. But if the condescension of my most holy Son was so great as to bestow so liberally upon thee his light and knowledge concerning these vast blessings, ponder well how much thou art bound to co-operate with this light. In order that thou mayest correspond to this obligation, I remind and exhort thee to forget all that is of earth and lose it out of thy sight; that thou seek nothing, or engage thyself with nothing except what can help thee to withdraw and detach thee from the world and its inhabitants; so that, with a heart freed from all terrestrial affection, thou dispose thyself to celebrate in it the mysteries of the poverty, humility and divine love of the incarnate God. Learn from my example the reverence, fear and respect, with which thou must treat Him, remembering how I acted, when I held Him in my arms; follow my example, whenever thou receivest Him in thy heart in the venerable sacrament of the holy Eucharist, wherein is contained the same God-Man, who was born of my womb. In this holy Sacrament thou receivest Him and possessest Him just as really, and He remains in thee just as actually, as I possessed Him and conversed with Him, although in another manner.
488. I desire that thou go even to extremes in this holy reverence and fear ; and I wish that thou take notice and be convinced, that in entering into thy heart in the holy Sacrament, thy God exhorts thee in the same words, which thou hast recorded as spoken to me: become like unto Me. His coming down from heaven onto the earth, his being born in humility and poverty, his living and dying in it, giving such rare example of the contempt of the world and its deceits; the knowledge, which thou hast received concerning his conduct and which thou hast penetrated so deeply by divine intelligence: all these things should be for thee like living voices, which thou must heed and inscribe into the interior of thy heart. These privileges have all been granted to thee in order that thou discreetly use the common blessings to their fullest extent, and in order that thou mayest understand, how thankful thou must be to my most holy Son and Lord, and how thou shouldst strive to make as great a return for his goodness, as if He had come from heaven to redeem thee alone and as if He had instituted all his wonders and doctrines in the holy Church for none else than thee (Gal. 7, 20). (Venerable Mary of Agreda, The Mystical City of God, Volume II: The Incarnation, pp. 408-410.)
These words would not have made John Calvin happy. They should make us very happy, especially as we meditate upon them while praying the Joyful Mysteries of Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary in this holy season of Advent.
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!
Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, pray for us
Saint Joseph, Patron of Departing Souls, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint Andrew the Apostle, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.
Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.
Saint Saturninus, pray for us.