A Season of Upside Down and Inside Out, As Well It Should Be
Halford Luccock’s name sounds like a character in a Christmas movie, but he was actually a real-life man of the cloth back in the day when clergy derived moral authority (at least in part) from deep and abiding eccentricity. (A case in point: Luccock for decades wrote a column in a national magazine under a pen name derived from a Christian ascetic who lived more than ten centuries ago, and resided for 36 years atop a stone pillar in Syria.)
But Luccock had insights about the season in which we find ourselves that ring true today, more than a century after he put pen to paper: “There is far-reaching appropriateness in the fact that the world’s immortal baby story… should be a story of turning things upside down – for that is a baby’s chief business. It is a gross slander on babies that their chief passion is food. It is rearrangement. Every orthodox baby rearranges all that [they] see, from the order of importance in the family to the bric-a-brac and window curtains. The advent of every baby completely upsets [their] little world, both physically and spiritually… It reminds [us] that every baby is born a savior, to some extent, from selfishness and greed and sin in the little circle which his advent blesses.”
“Christmas turns things inside out,” Luccock continued. “Under the spell of the Christmas story the locked up treasures of kindliness and sympathy come from the inside of the heart, where they are often kept imprisoned, to the outside of actual expression in deed and word.”
In word and in deed, the Broadsheet now begins its hiatus for the holidays. The last printed Broadsheet of the year was just delivered around Lower Manhattan, and the next issue of our print edition will appear in lobbies on January 18. After this morning, the Broadsheet Daily will brighten your inboxes again on January 5. Until then, here’s wishing for peace and goodwill toward all living things.