December 2, 2011

Letters to the Editor

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Is celebrating the feast of St. Nicholas a forgotten tradition?

Where is St. Nicholas?

When I was growing up, we always celebrated the feast of St. Nicholas on Dec. 6, but it seems that St. Nick has been forgotten.

It seems that Thanksgiving Day is the start of the Christmas celebrations, and St. Nicholas is skipped over.

I remember putting my stocking out on Dec. 5, and waking up the next morning to find it full.

Every year, it was the same, but it did not matter to us children. There were six of us in my family.

At the bottom of the stocking was some change, an orange, apple, some nuts in the shell, a banana, a little bit of candy and, lastly, a candy cane.

We were happy to get our stocking that day, and it meant a lot. We behaved a little better, and kept our rooms cleaner because we knew Christmas was coming soon.

Dec. 6 is the time to celebrate St. Nicholas (Santa). Christmas is the day that we celebrate the birth of Jesus.

There are not many people I know that celebrate St. Nick. When I tell people that I do, they look at me like I’m crazy.

There is only one other person I know that celebrates the feast of St. Nicholas outside of my family.

There used to be a lot of people that celebrated that day, but not so much anymore.

- Beth Miller, Fredericksburg

 

Latin is not the original language of our Catholic faith, reader says

The new English missal is touted as being more faithful to the “original” Latin text.

Yet, the liturgical language as well as the language of the Bible for the nascent Church was Greek.

Latin was introduced as a vernacular adaptation of the Greek liturgy, and as a vernacular translation of the scriptural Greek.

The Latin text may be claimed as the gold standard for the Church, but it does not constitute the original language.

- Benito Cerimele, Greenwood

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