The Nativity of Christ and Holy Pascha are primarily children’s feasts, and they seem to fulfill the power of Christ’s words: Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven (Mt. 18:3). The other feasts are not so accessible to children’s understanding and are pleasing to children in their external expression rather than in their inner meaning…
However, of the two mentioned great feasts a child is more likely to understand and accept the Nativity with his simple feeling. How happy is a child who has been able to hear simple stories from his pious mother about the Nativity of Christ the Savior! How happy is a mother who, while recounting the holy and touching story, has seen vivid curiosity and sympathy in her child, and herself heard from him the questions which a child’s fantasy loves to be so carried away by, and, inspired by these questions, hurried to convey her own pious feeling to her little one!
There is so much to attract a child’s imagination in this narrative. A serene night over the fields of Palestine; a secluded cattle shed, a manger surrounded by the domestic animals that are familiar to a child from his first impressions of memory. A Baby, wrapped in swaddling cloths, lay in the manger; and above Him was a meek, loving Mother with a pensive gaze and a clear smile of maternal happiness; three magnificent kings (the Magi) following a star towards the poor cattle shed with gifts; and far away in the field there were shepherds in the midst of their flock, listening to the Glad Tidings from an Angel and the mysterious chorus of the Heavenly powers. Then the villain Herod, seeking out the innocent Baby; then the massacre of the firstborn in Bethlehem; then the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt. How much life and action there is in all this, how much interest there is for a child!
It is an old and never-aging narrative! How appealing it was to a child’s ears, and how quickly a child’s understanding gets used to it! That’s why, as soon as you bring this simple story to mind, a whole world is resurrected in your soul, all your long-past childhood with its surroundings, with all the faces around it, with all its joys, the same mysterious anticipation of something that was always felt before the feast returns to your soul. What would have become of us if it were not for such moments of childish delight in our lives!
Such is the evening before Christmas: I have returned from the Vigil and am sitting at home in the same room in which my entire childhood was spent; my armchair now stands in front of my desk in the same place where my cradle and then my cot used to stand. Here is the window by which my old nanny used to sit and try to coax me into going to bed. But I didn’t want to sleep because my soul was excited, anticipating something joyful, something solemn in the morning. It wasn’t the expectation of presents—no—it was clear to the soul that tomorrow would be an extraordinary, bright, and joyful day, and something great would happen. Sometimes you would go to bed and later the bell would wake you up before Matins, and the nanny, who got up to go to church, would have to coax the child into sleeping longer.
Oh my God! I feel the same anticipation of childhood days in myself even now... How serene everything inside me is, how solemn everything inside me is! How everything in me breathes the feeling of bygone years, and with what spiritual eagerness I look forward to the festive morning! This feeling is the most precious gift from Heaven, sent to adults amid the worldly noise and bustle, so that they can vividly remember the time when they were children; therefore, so that they can be closer to God and accept from Him more ingenuously than ever life, light, day, food, joy, love and everything that makes God’s world beautiful for man.
But the child was never disappointed in this anticipation of great joy and a great festivity. In the child, a minute of waiting so merged with a minute of pleasure and satisfaction that it was impossible to catch the transition or the middle. Waking up in the morning, the child always found what he had been thinking about in the evening, and he saw when awake what his childish dreams had told him about: Isn’t reality for the child the same as a dream? Isn’t his dream the same as reality? In the morning the child would wake up surrounded by the same blessings of his life that he unconsciously received every day. What’s more, illuminated by the festive light, the faces around him were more cheerful, the caresses more lively, and the games more animated. What is more important for a child? He did not regret in the morning what he had a foretaste of in the evening. Just as eve’s anticipation was unconscious, so the morning’s enjoyment was unconscious…
O great and mysterious night! O radiant and triumphant morning! If I forget you, if I remain indifferent to you, if I stop hearing those voices and words that every believing soul hears in you, then it means that I will forget my childhood, my life and eternity itself... For what is blissful eternity if not the everlasting joy of a child before the face of God!
