Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, during the 12 Days of Christmas, Father Robert A. Sirico explains how Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” tells the season’s quietly revolutionary story: that of a God who embraces the world in all its imperfections.
We’re used to a certain Christmas aesthetic: warm, domestic, sentimental, festive. The imagery traces back to 1848, when an etching was published of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their children in front of their decorated tree. Today, your living rooms may be littered with the modern evidence of this tradition: trees adorned with ornaments; oranges stuck with cloves; leftovers filling the refrigerators; extended family members lounging about the couches before traveling back home.
This spirit brings light to the holiday season. But, of course, the theological drama of Christmas began long before the Victorian era.
