A CHRISTMAS CAROL

 

I know precisely when and where modern Christmas was born. It was late on the evening of Thursday, 5 October, 1843. And it was on the dismal streets of the Lancaster industrial town of Manchester, England. 

Then and there a dapper 31 year old clean shaven Charles John Huffman Dickens (above) went for a stroll.  He walked purposefully past the clattering cotton and textile mills and the stinking bleach works.

He slipped like an alien through the laborers milling around the foundry shops and on the docks of the befouled Irwell River -  men women and children who toiled 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, to survive on a paltry £9, 3 shillings. It was on such walks as these ““...when all the sober folks had gone to bed” that Charles Dickens created our Christmas.

Michelangelo once said his David was always hidden inside the marble. All he had to do was chip away everything which was not the young Israelite contemplating the approaching Goliath. Writers work the same way, but first they must create their own stones. And then they must mercilessly chip away until they reveal the story hidden inside themselves. Or, as sportswriter “Red” Smith put it, “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” And to do that on demand is to be a professional writer.

Charles Dickens had achieved instant fame with his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, published in serial form beginning in 1836. 

This was followed by the hugely popular Oliver Twist in 1837, the equally successful Nicholas Nickleby (above) in 1838, the less successful Old Curiosity Shop, in 1840, and the forgettable and forgotten Barnaby Rudge in 1841, all serialized in magazines. 

It began to seem Charles Dickens had peaked. But he still had to support a wife and four children, with a fifth child on the way. He remained the sole financial support for his impoverished parents, and other relatives in desperate straits. And there were the demands from his tailor, for Charles Dickens was a lifelong enthusiastic clothes horse.

In Chapter 29 of the Pickwick Papers, published at the end of October 1837, Dickens made one of his first references to the holiday, in the story of a garrulous old church sexton and grave digger named Gabriel Grub. “A little before twilight one Christmas eve, Gabriel Grub...betook himself towards the old churchyard, for he had got a grave to finish by next morning.” On his way, Grub pauses to threaten a young boy who is singing carols. Then, later, when he pauses to drink from a wicker jug he is challenged by a goblin king.

"What man wanders among graves and churchyards on such a night as this?" asked the goblin. "Gabriel Grub! Gabriel Grub!" screamed a wild chorus of voices that seemed to fill the churchyard.” 

The goblins take Grub under the earth, and display a tableau of a lives of a typical middle class English family, including the fate of a dying child. “His brother and sisters crowded around his little bed, and seized his tiny hand, so cold and heavy... What do you think of THAT? " said the goblin...,Gabriel murmured out something about its being very pretty.... You, a miserable man!" said the goblin in a tone of excessive contempt...”

After more lessons, Grub “came to the conclusion that it was a very decent and respectable sort of world, after all...” In the morning Gabriel Grub has mysteriously disappeared. “The lantern, the spade, and the wicker bottle were found that day in the churchyard.” But 10 years later Grub returns, to share his story of the Christmas goblins. It was far from a perfect holiday story. But it clearly chipped away a few of Charles' stones.

Six years later, on that Thursday evening of 5 October, 1843, Charles Dickens (above) faced a real  financial crises. His bank account was over drawn. Sales of his latest serialized book, Martin Chuzzlewit, had landed with a thud in 1842. The man who had hired him to write the Pickwick Papers, William Hall, was increasingly turning the business over his senior partner, Edward Chapman. And it was Chapman who suggested that Dickens' stipend (what today would be called an advance)  be reduced from £50 to just £37 and 10 shillings a week. The author figured he would need £1,000, to re-balance his checkbook and meet his obligations. Such were his hopes for the creation he conceived on that late evening walk in Manchester.

The creation of this story, like all 15 novels and 27 short stories Dickens would write, began with the title - “A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story at Christmas. ”. It would not be a novel, but a novella, only about 110 pages long and less than 30,000 words total. In keeping with the musical theme, Dickens divided the novella not into chapters but into “Staves” (above).   In American English these 5 lines and the 4 spaces between them are referred to as a staff, upon which musical notes are written. In English, English they are staves. On the morning train returning him to London, Dickens began to dip his pen into ink and scratch his solution for his  financial crises onto paper.

Dickens plucked the name of his central character, Ebenezer Scrooge, from a headstone he had come across in an Edinburgh graveyard in 1841 – Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie. The real Ebenezer had been a corn merchant and bottler of “Scroggie's Highland Brandie”. His grave marker called him a “meal man”, but Dickens misread the inscription as a “mean man”, which is why he remembered the name. In truth, Scroggie was not mean or cruel, but he was a social reprobate, a 'dirty old man', who raped a servant girl on a churchyard grave stone, fathering a child, and broke up a solemn convocation of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland by groping the Countess of Mansfield in the pews.

Scrooge's miserliness seems to have been based on James (Jemmy) Wood (above), famous as the “Gloucester Miser”. He was one of the richest men in England and left an estate worth £900,000. His primary business was the Gloucester Old Bank but Wood also owned an undertaking business. He wore the same clothes for weeks on end, and never took a cab when he could walk. The staff of his bank consisted of himself and just 2 clerks. But where Wood was an active participant in the city, Scrooges' mean spirit toward the poor was found in philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who, when asked about the working poor, replied, "Are there not treadmills, gibbets; even hospitals, poor-rates, New Poor-Law?s"

The name of Scrooge's business partner came from a sign Dickens had seen in his childhood, “Goodge and Marney”.  And Marley's chains were the reality seen by Dickens during his 1842 tour of the Western Penitentiary, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 

The crippled Tiny Tim (called “Little Fred” or “Tiny Nick” in early drafts) was based on Dickens' sister Fanny's 5 year old son, Henry Burnett, Jr, whom Charles had met while in Manchester. Dickens agreed to pay for the boy's medical care, adding to his own financial burden.

Bob Cratchit (above, left)  was just one of the 104 clerks Dickens created in his writings. because in the era when computers were still humans, clerks were ubiquitous in the “nation of shop keepers”. Punch described the 1845 tongue in cheek requirements for the job. “First take your son, and soak him well in spelling and writing. Grind in a few ounces of grammar, stuff with arithmetic, and season with geography. Lard with a little Latin, and baste with birch (whipping cane) whenever you find it requisite. Serve up on a high stool, at the first convenient opportunity.”

The common saying went that “A good clerk is always employed”, but the pay was meager and the restrictions were onerous. Applicants were expected to provide a doctor’s certificate as to their health and “steady and sober habits”. And if hired the clerk must “devote himself exclusively to the Company’s service and interest” even when off duty. They must also provide a 2 week salary to their boss, as “as a security for good conduct.” Bob Cratchet worked for 15 shillings a week, or less than $100 in modern American currency.

Dickens wanted the book he was about to write to be on sale no later than the Monday before Christmas, which in 1844, would be 19, December. That gave him just 74 days to write and edit the story. But he found his publishers, Chapman And Hall, less than enthusiastic. Edwin Chapman suggested either no illustrations or simple woodcut drawings. But Dickens had conceived of the book as a keepsake Christmas present, which would require color art. When Chapman refused, Dickens agreed to pay the full cost of publishing the still uncompleted book himself, and split the profits with the publisher. His hoped for £1,000 profit was already fading into the distance.

The little tale was haunting Dickens. His sister-in-law, wrote that he “...wept and laughed, and wept again” and that he “walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night”. 

Now, Dickens had to find an artist for those drawings he was paying for. When his usual collaborator was already engaged, and with time at a premium, Dickens asked John Leech (above)  to create the art. Leech was journeyman known as a “rapid worker”. But Dickens' shortage of funds forced him to limit the color illustrations to just 4, with another 4 black and white etchings.

On Tuesday, 24, October, 1843, Dickens wrote to a Scottish friend, that he had “...plunged headlong into a little scheme ...and set an artist at work upon it.” And by Saturday, 2 December, 1843 his scheme was finished. But not done. Now he began the editing and rewrites. It was not until late in this process that Dickens changed the penultimate line. “ He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, he was a second father”, adding the phrase describing Tiny Tim, “who did not die”. That allowed a happy ending.

On Sunday, 17 December, 1843, Dickens was forced to finally release the book to the printer. Because of the color art work, and the rewrites, if the first edition of 6,000 copies sold out completely at the steep price of 5 shillings each (about $24 today), Dickens stood to profit just £230, far from the £1,000 he had been hoping for. The book went on sale Monday, 19 December. By Christmas eve, every single copy was sold.

The Illustrated London News praised Dickens' “impressive eloquence” and praised the novella's “unfeigned lightness of heart—its playful and sparkling humor... its gentle spirit of humanity".

The reviewer from the literary magazine The Anthenaeum said the story was a "tale to make the reader laugh and cry – to...open his heart to charity even toward the uncharitable”.  

Long time Dickens critic, Theodore Martin, writing in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, fell over himself to praise the author, He called the book, "a noble book, finely felt and calculated to work much social good".

Chapman and Hall were quick to respond to the unexpected success of Dickens little scheme. They immediately issued a second edition, which sold out immediately, and then a third edition before the week – and the year - was over. All three editions sold out. 

But almost equally quick were the folks at Peter Parley's Illuminated Library, published by Richard Egan Lee and Henry Hewitt. In January of 1844 they issued an almost exact copy of the Christmas Carol, stealing Dickens work and selling it for a mere two pence. Dickens quickly sued and won,  but Lee and Hewitt promptly declared bankruptcy, leaving the author to swallow the £700 in court costs and legal fees.

Over the rest of 1844, 11 more additions of “A Christmas Carol” were released. But because of Dickens' demands for quality, the printing costs remained high, and a year later the author had profited only £744. Stung by what he saw as Edmund Chapman's lack of faith in his work, and burdened with a bill he felt his publishers should have paid, Dickens left Chapman and Hall and moved to the publishing house of Bradbury and Evans.

Since that December of 1843, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol has never been out of print. But perhaps the most telling effect of Dickens' scheme was the story of a Boston factory owner who attended a Christmas eve reading by the author. The very next day this man gave all his employees a Christmas turkey, and the day off. 

But to me. “A Christmas Carol” is proof that if you struggle hard enough and long enough, you can become a journeyman at your profession. And if you work at that profession diligently, once in awhile, if you are lucky, you might achieve the level of genius.

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YES, VIRGINIA

I know of only two moments that justifies the sin of pride. Both are a "Horace Mann moment". The first, of course, when you have “won some victory for humanity”, and the second is when a child raised by you does the same. Consider Philip F. O'Hanlon, who in his own life achieved wealth and professional and public recognition. In 1886, right out of N.Y. University Medical School, this sixth generation physician became the head of surgery at the new Gouverneur Community Hospital, on the lower east side of Manhattan.

He was appointed the State Medical Examiner in 1891, and in 1895 became New York City Coroner and Police Surgeon. The later two posts made him famous, and his testimony front page news in several big murder trials. But it was as a father that Philip O'Hanlon won his greatest victory for humanity, because his daughter was Laura Virginia O'Hanlon.

Laura Virginia O'Hanlon (above, she was named after her mother), was born 20 July, 1889, the same year the family leased a larger home, at 115 West 95th Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, just a block west of Manhattan's Central Park. It was a relatively new brownstone, with a red brick front and peaked roof, having just one previous owner. As she reached the age of reason, Laura decided she preferred the name Virginia. And in the late summer of 1897, Virginia approached her father with a simple but profound question, belying her innocence and tender age. 

Fifty years later Virginia remembered the event this way: “Quite naturally I believed in Santa Claus, for he had never disappointed me.  But when less fortunate little boys and girls said there wasn't any Santa Claus, I was filled with doubts.  I asked my father, and he was a little evasive on the subject....It was a habit in our family that whenever any doubts came up as to how to pronounce a word or some question of historical fact was in doubt, we wrote to the Question and Answer column in “The Sun”. Father would always say, “If you see it in the The Sun, it's so,” and that settled the matter. “Well, I'm just going to write The Sun and find out the real truth,” I said to father. “He said, “Go ahead, Virginia. I'm sure The Sun will give you the right answer, as it always does.”

Consider for a moment this privileged Victorian child, Virginia O'Hanlon  (above) -  the daughter of a well known community leader in New York City. At eight years of age she knew children who were less fortunate than herself,  knew them well enough to talk with them, to share the theology of childhood. She was raised in a home in which the family shared knowledge, and the joy of discovery. Parents and their only child learned together. And she was encouraged to seek truth on her own.

So early in September of 1897, Virginia wrote the following letter. “Dear Editor: I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?” She mailed it to The Sun newspaper offices, at 280 Broadway, New York City.

The Sun (“It Shines for All”) had been published in New York since 1833, but in 1868 it acquired its most famous editor, Charles Anderson Dana (above). Under Dana “The Sun” was a strongly Democratic newspaper, and “a newspaper man's newspaper”, and first of the modern newspapers, introducing editorials, society news, and human-interest stories, along side the “hard news”,  all squeezed into eight pages or less, two editions every weekday, and recently even a Sunday edition, with a circulation at its peak of 130,000.  Dana collected about him young, talented writers, and who followed his concisely stated revolutionary approach to news: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”

But as Dana aged, “The Sun” became “notoriously inconsistent”. Others improved upon his method, like Joseph Pulitzer at the “New York World”, and built larger circulations, like William Randolph Hearst via his “Yellow Journalism”. By Charles Dana's death in 1897, and his replacement by his son Paul, “The Sun” had slipped to fourth along Newspaper Row (aka Park Row, above ) in lower Manhattan - “The World”, “The Tribune”, “The Times” and now lastly “The Sun”.

It was one of Dana's talented young writers, now an editor, named Edward Mitchell, who was the father of modern Science Fiction. And in early September Mitchell handed Virginia O'Hanlon's letter to a 58 year old editorial writer, Francis Pharcellus Church (above). He was a Columbia graduate, who had reported on the horrors of the Civil War. With his brother, Church co-founded two successful magazines. According to Mitchell, after reading Virginia's letter  “...he pooh-poohed the subject a little. Then he took it, and in a short time handed me (the) article” And on 21 September, 1897,  in a standard 500 word unsigned editorial, printed in the middle of page seven, the journeyman writer responded to the little girl's letter.

“Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age...Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence....Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus...Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”

The letter and its column were  not an instant phenomenon.  It was not until the 1920's that the newspaper began to reprint it annually. But by 1930, “The Sun” was receiving over 163,000 requests for reprints every year. Since then it has appeared in thousands of newspapers and books, decade after decade , and remains the most reprinted editorial in the English language. But it was not until after his death on 11 April, 1906, that The Sun broke their own rules and named Francis Church as the author.  Church never married and had no children. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

In 1898, young William Randolph Hearst, in building his own newspaper empire, drove America into war with Spain. Virginia's father, Dr. Philip O'Hanlon, volunteered as lieutenant in the Medical Reserve Corps. He survived that service, and was listed as still alive in 1920, and still living on 95th street, although now on the south side of the street.

Virginia O'Hanlon  (above) received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Hunter College in 1910,  a Master's in Education from Columbia University in 1912, and the same year she began teaching underprivileged grade school children in New York City schools. 

In 1913 she married Edward Douglas, but he abandoned her just before she gave birth to her daughter, Laura Temple Douglas (above) in March of 1914.  Virginia was eventually promoted to principal, and in 1930 was even awarded her doctorate from Fordham University. Her dissertation was titled “The Importance of Play.” Her daughter would grow up, marry and have seven children of her own.

One of those grandchildren, Virginia Rogers (above, with Virginia), remembered as a child visiting her grandmother in New York City. “Gram was a lady," she said, "Very elegant. She would dress up to go across the street (to the)...post office. At Christmastime, there would be literally box-loads of mail addressed to my grandmother.”  Another granddaughter said, “She was a woman ahead of her time.”

Virginia never took credit for the column her letter inspired. She told her nephew, James Temple, “All I did was ask the question. It was Mr. Church who did something wonderful.” Virginia told an interviewer, Church's column “gave me a special place in life I didn’t deserve. It also made me try to live up to the philosophy of the editorial and to try to make glad the heart of childhood.”

What Virginia did was to teach at Brooklyn’s P.S.401, which held classes for chronically ill children confined at home or in hospitals. Eventually she became a principle at the school. Shortly before she retired she wrote another letter, this one addressed to the “Children of Yesterday.” She pleaded, “Some little children doubt that Santa still lives because often their letters ...never seem to reach him. Nurses in hospitals know who some of these children are. Teachers in great city schools will know others....Won’t you try to seek out these trusting children of today and make sure that their letters in some way reach Santa Claus so that “he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.” Laura Virginia O'Hanlon Douglas had made that her life's work, after retiring from teaching in 1950.

Nine years later she moved to North Chatham, 15 miles south of Albany, New York, to live with her daughter.  During the Christmas holidays in 1969, heart problems forced Virginia to be admitted to the Columbia Memorial Hospital, in Hudson, New York.  There she was visited by Santa Clause (above), disguised as John Harms, a hospital maintenance man, who often visited patients.  He kissed Virginia on the cheek, and she whispered in his ear that she still believed.  Virginia died, in the Barnwell Nursing Home, in Valatie, N.Y., on 13 May, 1974.  She was 81 years old.

Her original letter, which the newspaper had returned, was saved in a scrapbook by a granddaughter and somehow survived a house fire. Today, the brownstone at 115 West 95th street (above), is occupied by The Studio School, where children from “an economically diverse student body” (20% receive financial aid), “ learn to value intellectual and creative ideas, and to take pleasure in the process of discovery.” The school maintains a Virginia O’Hanlon Scholarship Fund to help students with financial needs.

Late in her life, Virginia wrote the following. “Those whom Santa visits think of Christmas as a beautiful, sacred occasion which it should be — but today seldom is. But for every child tucked into bed Christmas night with his new toy, there are hundreds, no thousands, who huddle in ragged bed clothing sobbing in the night at a fate at best cruel.” And Virginia asked us all to “Remember the children at Christmas.”  

Will you try and do that ?  Please.

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BATTLE OF THE NATIVITY

 

I am tempted to call it a primeval struggle, drenched in antiquity and destined to feed future conflict until judgment day, whenever the heck that may  be. Except it was much simpler than that. The day after Christmas 2007, two rival gangs, "The Jets" (AKA the Greek Orthodox Priests), and "The Sharks" (AKA the Armenian Apostolic Priests) got into a turf dispute inside the Church of the Nativity, the traditional birth place of the Prince of Peace in Bethlehem, Israel, Palestinian Territories. And I blame the long dead French Emperor Napoleon III for the entire mess.

First, a word about all that antiquity – it does not appear to have happened where or when everybody now thinks it did - assuming it happened at all. Roman census or no census, there was no reason for a pregnant Mary to be making a 90 mile donkey ride from Nazareth, on the Galilee plain of northern Israel, to Bethlehem in the mountains just south of Jerusalem, in the west center of Israel. Being the man, Joseph was expected and qualified to speak for his entire family. He would have been the only one required to travel. But why require anybody to travel? The Romans census takers counted people where they were. That would be where their property was, and where their money was. Why disrupt business all across a rebellious province, in the name of counting people where they were not? It makes no sense.

And there is another problem, an archaeological problem. There is no archeology in Bethlehem from that period. The ground under today's Bethlehem contains Iron Age artifacts and Byzantine artifacts, but nothing in between, nothing from the age of Jesus. The village outside of Jerusalem did not exist on the night that Jesus was born.. However, there was another Bethlehem, “Bethlehem Ha Galilit”, Bethlehem of Galilee, just about 7 miles to the west of Nazareth. It seems far more likely that Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem Ha Galilit, than in Bethlehem Judea. But because Bethlehem Ha Galilit no longer existed in the fourth century of the common era, when the Byzantine Christians came looking for Jesus' birthplace, they picked the wrong Bethlehem. So did the followers of Islam, when they first captured the region in year 627 of the common era.  After all, Jesus is one of their prophets, too. But after that little mix up, things got really complicated.

See, after the Crusaders were driven out of the Holy Land in 1187 the Muslim rulers were willing to protect the Christian holy sites, and, of course, tax them. But they did not trust the Roman Catholics, who had invaded them and now made up a majority of Bethlehem Judea’s population.  So the Muslim rulers split control of the profitable tourist sites in Bethlehem Judea between the Greek and Armenian Orthodox churches, in particular, ownership  of the church built upon the “traditional” site of the birth of Jesus. 

The Greek Orthodox were given control of one part of the building, the Armenian Orthodox control of another part. This allowed the Muslims rulers to play the two Christian sects one against the other, and to play them both off the Roman Catholics, who were now the poor relations in town.

And thus some calm was achieved in a region not famous for calm, at least until 1852, when a “firman” (or edict) was issued by Abdulmecit I, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and Caliph of the Muslim World (above). Abdulmecit issued his edict because…well, because first, in 1847 some thug stole the silver star which marked the “traditional” spot of Jesus’ birth, in the floor of the Church of the Nativity, and, more importantly, because the Sultan was weak and because Louis Napoleon III of France was a pompous political hack, who believed that he had been chosen by God to fix, first France, and then rest of the world, by making it more French.

Louis Napoleon III (above) was elected to a ten year term as the first President of the Second Republic of France in December of 1848. He immediately started plotting to follow in his uncle’s imperial boot prints. 

By early in 1852 Louis had helped to restore the Vatican’s independence in Italy (which pleased French Catholic voters), but he had also insisted that the new Papal government be drawn up along “liberal” lines, to placate the liberal (meaning non-Catholic) French voters. But no Church ever likes to be lectured about liberal policies from secular politicians. Try it some time and see.

In an attempt to placate the now angry French Catholic voters, Napoleon III suggested that the theft of the star from the Church of the Nativity (five years earlier) proved that the Church of the Nativity was no longer “safe”, and control should be handed over to the Roman Catholic Church for protection - yet another politician declaring a crises which needed his genius to solve. 

This particular crises pleased Pope Pius IX. (above, center), who had come to the conclusion that Czar Nicholas I of Russia was intent upon wiping out Catholicism in his country - which Nicholas was, the Czar being the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Napoleon's demand also pleased Abdulmecit I (above), because Albdulmecit had the distinct feeling that Czar Nicholas was about to invade Turkey - which he was. So, under Abdulmecit's edict, the keys to the Church of the Nativity were now handed over the priests of the Roman Catholic Church, who would unlock the doors every day so the Greek and Armenian Orthodox priests could enter the building, and then lock them out every every night.   At the same time the edict also required the Vatican to maintain the church of the Nativity “in statu quo res errant”, or, “as it was before”. This edict is linguistically important because it popularization the Latin phrase “status quo”, so that it became a regular part of the English language and used by people who never heard about any of this stuff.

Now, while growing up Russian Czar Nicholas I (above) had been told that Russia was a military superpower and protector of the true faith, that faith being Russian Orthodoxy. And Nicholas was not about to allow a mere “politician”, least of all a trumped up “Bonaparte”, to usurp his regal and holy authority. 

Nicholas demanded the keys to the Church of the Nativity be returned to the Armenian and Greek priests, who would, he was certain, be controlled by him. And when the keys were not handed over,  he declared war on Turkey - of course, he had been planning on doing that anyway.  Britain and France then came to Turkey’s defense. 

And so Napoleon's gambit to impress French Catholic voters led directly to the Crimean War, and 118,000 dead; of whom 20, 000 were French, and 73,000 were Russian.  And, as part of the peace treaty that ended that war, the keys to the Church of the Nativity were returned to the Greek and Armenian priests, to share.

In his rise to power Napoleon III (above) had shamelessly played one political faction off another, and eventually abolished democracy in his own nation, created a throne for himself, and invaded Algeria and Vietnam and made them colonies - both of which actions came back to haunt France a century later. 

Finally, in 1870, Napoleon was goaded into the Franco-Prussian War,  which resulted in his humiliating defeat, the creation of Germany,  and Napoleon's own overthrow and his death. This guy was the Donald Trump of 19th century French diplomacy.

The Crimean War also cost Czar Nicholas I his life. While on campaign against Turkey he caught a chill and died of pneumonia on 2 March, 1855. And that postponed Russia's status as a superpower. The Ottoman Sultan, Abdülmecit, lived long enough to see his nation plunged into debt by that same war.  By Abdulmecit's death from tuberculosis in 1861, Turkey was flat broke. His successor was dethroned.

Amazingly, the same war left Pope Pius IX (above) alive but very frustrated. 

Because France had been distracted by the Crimean War, there was no help from France when in 1860, Victor Emmanuel took control of Italy from the Catholic Church and established the modern semi-secular nation of Italy, leaving the Vatican City as a tiny fig leaf to placate the Pope's ego.    

But Pius achieved a measure of revenge when, in 1869 he issued the decree of Papal Infallibility and declared the dogma of Immaculate Conception. Together these meant that Mary, mother of Jesus, was born without sin because the Pope said she was without sin. And the Pope was never wrong, because he said he was never wrong. These are not ancient concepts, but industrial age justifications.

Neither of these were official Roman Catholic dogma until 1869, but it has been church dogma ever since. Only two American Presidents have claimed a similar divinity. One was  Richard Nixon, and he was forced to resign, and Donald Trump, and his arrogance ensured he was a one term President  - so claiming divinity seems to only work for religious leaders.

But, let us finally return to the Church of the Nativity on 27 December, 2007. According to the Associated Press; “....dozens of priests and cleaners came to the fortress-like church to scrub and sweep the floors, walls and rafters ahead of the Armenian and Orthodox Christmas, celebrated in the first week of January...  But the clean-up turned ugly after some of the {Greek) Orthodox faithful stepped inside the Armenian church's section, touching off a scuffle between about 50 Greek Orthodox and 30 Armenians. Palestinian police, armed with batons and shields, quickly formed a human cordon to separate the two sides so the cleaning could continue...Four people, some with blood running from their faces, were slightly injured.”

Traditionally both the Greek and Armenian Orthodox churches have recruited their priests for this sacred post in the Church of the Nativity, from tiny isolated villages scattered across Greece and the Armenia, where Christians (and Muslims) have been slaughtering each other for a thousand years. These naive young men now suddenly found themselves working in intimate contact and sharing the most precious artifacts of their faith with heretics. Nothing in their lives or their training prepared them for any kind of peaceful coexistence. Politics may make you a jackass, but religion stands a stronger chance of encouraging you to kill somebody 

And the whole thing was Louis Napoleon III’s idea.  But try explaining that to a bunch of uneducated foreigners.

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