There are several things that make the Christmas of 1981 memorable in my mind. It was my youngest child’s second Christmas but the first that he was able to comprehend in some sense. One of our favorite Christmas photos is of him staring transfixed at the Christmas tree lights and decorations. After several accidents, his mother had told him he could look but not touch.
A second thing making that Christmas memorable was my dad turning 70 several weeks before it. His age seemed ancient to me at the time, but not so ancient today since I passed it a few years ago. My dad was nine months younger than Ronald Reagan almost to the day. The Reagan years had just begun and with each of my dad’s later birthdays I would remind him that he was now old enough to be President.
The third thing that makes the Christmas of 1981 memorable to me was happening in the country that gave the world Nicolaus Copernicus, Fryderyk Chopin (one of my favorite composers), Marie Curie-Sklodowska, John Paul II (in his fourth year as Pope), and Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity movement which ultimately brought about the collapse of communism – although at the time there was no way of knowing that would be the outcome.
The Solidarity movement had been giving Moscow heartburn and the Russian overlords decided to replace Poland’s nominal leader, Stanislaw Kania, whom they thought was too soft, with General Wojciech Jaruzelski whose reputation for repression was reminiscent of Poland’s long history of foreign occupation and domination. Predictably, Jaruzelski struck like the villainous dictator he was and established harsh martial law to crush Solidarity. Strikes swept the country, many unionists were killed, Solidarity leaders were arrested and jailed, and only starvation brought the surrender of the last holdouts deep in the coal mines. It seemed to me that the world was moving toward another Cold War confrontation with the paranoid leadership of the Soviet Union.
Reagan was completing his first year in the White House and was still something of an unknown quantity. His love of freedom and hatred of communism were well-known, however, and there was little doubt that he would do something. One of his advisers later noted that Reagan was “livid” about the Polish situation. Moreover, the world’s political leaders, Pope John Paul, NATO, and activists outside of the Iron Curtain had united to denounce Jaruzelski’s crackdown.
On December 19, 1981, Polish Ambassador Romuald Spasowski, once an enthusiastic communist, notified the State Department that he was defecting and requested asylum. The next day he announced his defection in a radio message to the world saying he had acted to show support for Solidarity and Lech Walesa. "The cruel night of darkness and silence was spread over my country," he said. Reagan invited him to the White House for a private meeting on December 22 during which Spasowski asked Reagan if he would light a candle and put it in a White House window to show support for the people of Poland. Reagan did just that with his own hands as Spasowski and his wife watched and wept.
During the evening of December 23, as my family readied for Christmas, Reagan went on television to give his Christmas message to the nation and to address the worsening situation in Poland. I was able to find the text of his speech which I’ve edited in the following paragraphs. It is a memorable commentary that, for a society already secularized 32 years ago, Reagan felt comfortable to speak of the spirit of Christmas in such religious terms.
Good evening.
At Christmas time, every home takes on a special beauty, a special warmth, and that's certainly true of the White House, where so many famous Americans have spent their Christmases over the years. This fine old home, the people's house, has seen so much, been so much a part of all our lives and history. It's been humbling and inspiring for Nancy and me to be spending our first Christmas in this place.
We've lived here as your tenants for almost a year now, and what a year it's been. As a people we've been through quite a lot—moments of joy, of tragedy, and of real achievement—moments that I believe have brought us all closer together. G. K. Chesterton once said that the world would never starve for wonders, but only for the want of wonder.
At this special time of year, we all renew our sense of wonder in recalling the story of the first Christmas in Bethlehem, nearly 2,000 years ago.
Some celebrate Christmas as the birthday of a great and good philosopher and teacher. Others of us believe in the divinity of the child born in Bethlehem, that he was and is the promised Prince of Peace. Yes, we've questioned why he who could perform miracles chose to come among us as a helpless babe, but maybe that was his first miracle, his first great lesson that we should learn to care for one another.
Tonight, in millions of American homes, the glow of the Christmas tree is a reflection of the love Jesus taught us. Like the shepherds and wise men of that first Christmas, we Americans have always tried to follow a higher light, a star, if you will. At lonely campfire vigils along the frontier, in the darkest days of the Great Depression, through war and peace, the twin beacons of faith and freedom have brightened the American sky. At times our footsteps may have faltered, but trusting in God's help, we've never lost our way.
Just across the way from the White House stand the two great emblems of the holiday season: a Menorah, symbolizing the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, and the National Christmas Tree, a beautiful towering blue spruce from Pennsylvania. Like the National Christmas Tree, our country is a living, growing thing planted in rich American soil. Only our devoted care can bring it to full flower. So, let this holiday season be for us a time of rededication.
Even as we rejoice, however, let us remember that for some Americans, this will not be as happy a Christmas as it should be. I know a little of what they feel. I remember one Christmas Eve during the Great Depression, my father opening what he thought was a Christmas greeting. It was a notice that he no longer had a job.
A few months before he took up residence in this house, one of my predecessors, John Kennedy, tried to sum up the temper of the times with a quote from an author closely tied to Christmas, Charles Dickens. We were living, he said, in the best of times and the worst of times. Well, in some ways that's even more true today. The world is full of peril, as well as promise. Too many of its people, even now, live in the shadow of want and tyranny.
As I speak to you tonight, the fate of a proud and ancient nation hangs in the balance. For a thousand years, Christmas has been celebrated in Poland, a land of deep religious faith, but this Christmas brings little joy to the courageous Polish people. They have been betrayed by their own government.
The men who rule them and their totalitarian allies fear the very freedom that the Polish people cherish. They have answered the stirrings of liberty with brute force, killings, mass arrests, and the setting up of concentration camps. Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders are imprisoned, their fate unknown. Factories, mines, universities, and homes have been assaulted.
The target of this [repression] is the Solidarity Movement, but in attacking Solidarity its enemies attack an entire people. Ten million of Poland's 36 million citizens are members of Solidarity. Taken together with their families, they account for the overwhelming majority of the Polish nation. By persecuting Solidarity the Polish Government wages war against its own people.
I urge the Polish Government and its allies to consider the consequences of their actions. How can they possibly justify using naked force to crush a people who ask for nothing more than the right to lead their own lives in freedom and dignity? Brute force may intimidate, but it cannot form the basis of an enduring society, and the ailing Polish economy cannot be rebuilt with terror tactics.
Yesterday, I met in this very room with Romuald Spasowski, the distinguished former Polish Ambassador who has sought asylum in our country in protest of the suppression of his native land. He told me that one of the ways the Polish people have demonstrated their solidarity in the face of martial law is by placing lighted candles in their windows to show that the light of liberty still glows in their hearts.
Ambassador Spasowski requested that on Christmas Eve a lighted candle will burn in the White House window as a small but certain beacon of our solidarity with the Polish people. I urge all of you to do the same tomorrow night, on Christmas Eve, as a personal statement of your commitment to the steps we're taking to support the brave people of Poland in their time of troubles.
Once, earlier in this century, an evil influence threatened that the lights were going out all over the world. Let the light of millions of candles in American homes give notice that the light of freedom is not going to be extinguished. We are blessed with a freedom and abundance denied to so many. Let those candles remind us that these blessings bring with them a solid obligation, an obligation to the God who guides us, an obligation to the heritage of liberty and dignity handed down to us by our forefathers and an obligation to the children of the world, whose future will be shaped by the way we live our lives today.
Christmas means so much because of one special child. But Christmas also reminds us that all children are special, that they are gifts from God, gifts beyond price that mean more than any presents money can buy. In their love and laughter, in our hopes for their future lies the true meaning of Christmas.
So, in a spirit of gratitude for what we've been able to achieve together over the past year and looking forward to all that we hope to achieve together in the years ahead, Nancy and I want to wish you all the best of holiday seasons. As Charles Dickens, whom I quoted a few moments ago, said so well in "A Christmas Carol," "God bless us, every one."
As Reagan spoke I looked at my small children aged 2, 4, and 6 scattered about on the floor, eyeing the tree across the room already surrounded by gifts as their mother wrapped more. I couldn’t help but see the contradiction in my circumstances with those living six time zones east in Poland. We put a candle in our front window that night for the people of Poland.
I wondered then and continue to wonder today why Americans don’t get on their knees every day to thank God who for whatever reason – certainly not for deserving it – has blessed this country so much among the nations of the world.
I wonder if any public official today would use the terms Reagan used so openly above to talk about the “first Christmas in Bethlehem” two millennia ago, the “divinity of the child born,” who could perform miracles, who “chose to come among us as a helpless babe,” and that “Christmas means so much because of one special child”?
The world into which Jesus was born was under the boot of the Roman Empire whose cruelty would make Nazism pale in comparison. Prophets had foretold his coming for over a thousand years:
For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; and the government will rest on His shoulders; and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of His government.
It is an extravagant promise, don’t you think?
Yet, in the 32 years since Reagan gave his sunny address on the meaning of Christmas in a world about to explode, the secular elites have done their best to drive Christ out of Christmas. If Christmas weren’t already a holiday, they would prevent its becoming one. A crèche is now a desecration of the public square. When I was a child in public school, we began every day’s class with a Bible reading by the teacher and a prayer. The secular elites have ended that practice with a perversion of the First Amendment, using the State to bar religion instead of barring the State from sponsoring a religion. But that’s precisely what secular elitism is – a religion. Except that its religion tolerates no character claiming to be God, Prince of Peace, or the creator of a government that will increase without end.
Secular elitism rejects such outlandish claims. But that rejection was also foretold by prophets more than a thousand years before the miraculous birth in Bethlehem.
For He grew up … like a tender shoot, like a root out of parched ground; He has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon Him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him. He was despised and rejected – a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care.
God knew He would be rejected by the world. But He came anyway.
Why?
Because if God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. If God carried a wallet, your picture would be in it. Your birthday would be circled if God kept a calendar. And if God lived in a house, one of its rooms would be specifically designated as yours.
No matter what we think of God, that’s what He thinks of us.
Merry Christmas!
A second thing making that Christmas memorable was my dad turning 70 several weeks before it. His age seemed ancient to me at the time, but not so ancient today since I passed it a few years ago. My dad was nine months younger than Ronald Reagan almost to the day. The Reagan years had just begun and with each of my dad’s later birthdays I would remind him that he was now old enough to be President.
The third thing that makes the Christmas of 1981 memorable to me was happening in the country that gave the world Nicolaus Copernicus, Fryderyk Chopin (one of my favorite composers), Marie Curie-Sklodowska, John Paul II (in his fourth year as Pope), and Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity movement which ultimately brought about the collapse of communism – although at the time there was no way of knowing that would be the outcome.
The Solidarity movement had been giving Moscow heartburn and the Russian overlords decided to replace Poland’s nominal leader, Stanislaw Kania, whom they thought was too soft, with General Wojciech Jaruzelski whose reputation for repression was reminiscent of Poland’s long history of foreign occupation and domination. Predictably, Jaruzelski struck like the villainous dictator he was and established harsh martial law to crush Solidarity. Strikes swept the country, many unionists were killed, Solidarity leaders were arrested and jailed, and only starvation brought the surrender of the last holdouts deep in the coal mines. It seemed to me that the world was moving toward another Cold War confrontation with the paranoid leadership of the Soviet Union.
Reagan was completing his first year in the White House and was still something of an unknown quantity. His love of freedom and hatred of communism were well-known, however, and there was little doubt that he would do something. One of his advisers later noted that Reagan was “livid” about the Polish situation. Moreover, the world’s political leaders, Pope John Paul, NATO, and activists outside of the Iron Curtain had united to denounce Jaruzelski’s crackdown.
On December 19, 1981, Polish Ambassador Romuald Spasowski, once an enthusiastic communist, notified the State Department that he was defecting and requested asylum. The next day he announced his defection in a radio message to the world saying he had acted to show support for Solidarity and Lech Walesa. "The cruel night of darkness and silence was spread over my country," he said. Reagan invited him to the White House for a private meeting on December 22 during which Spasowski asked Reagan if he would light a candle and put it in a White House window to show support for the people of Poland. Reagan did just that with his own hands as Spasowski and his wife watched and wept.
During the evening of December 23, as my family readied for Christmas, Reagan went on television to give his Christmas message to the nation and to address the worsening situation in Poland. I was able to find the text of his speech which I’ve edited in the following paragraphs. It is a memorable commentary that, for a society already secularized 32 years ago, Reagan felt comfortable to speak of the spirit of Christmas in such religious terms.
Good evening.
At Christmas time, every home takes on a special beauty, a special warmth, and that's certainly true of the White House, where so many famous Americans have spent their Christmases over the years. This fine old home, the people's house, has seen so much, been so much a part of all our lives and history. It's been humbling and inspiring for Nancy and me to be spending our first Christmas in this place.
We've lived here as your tenants for almost a year now, and what a year it's been. As a people we've been through quite a lot—moments of joy, of tragedy, and of real achievement—moments that I believe have brought us all closer together. G. K. Chesterton once said that the world would never starve for wonders, but only for the want of wonder.
At this special time of year, we all renew our sense of wonder in recalling the story of the first Christmas in Bethlehem, nearly 2,000 years ago.
Some celebrate Christmas as the birthday of a great and good philosopher and teacher. Others of us believe in the divinity of the child born in Bethlehem, that he was and is the promised Prince of Peace. Yes, we've questioned why he who could perform miracles chose to come among us as a helpless babe, but maybe that was his first miracle, his first great lesson that we should learn to care for one another.
Tonight, in millions of American homes, the glow of the Christmas tree is a reflection of the love Jesus taught us. Like the shepherds and wise men of that first Christmas, we Americans have always tried to follow a higher light, a star, if you will. At lonely campfire vigils along the frontier, in the darkest days of the Great Depression, through war and peace, the twin beacons of faith and freedom have brightened the American sky. At times our footsteps may have faltered, but trusting in God's help, we've never lost our way.
Just across the way from the White House stand the two great emblems of the holiday season: a Menorah, symbolizing the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, and the National Christmas Tree, a beautiful towering blue spruce from Pennsylvania. Like the National Christmas Tree, our country is a living, growing thing planted in rich American soil. Only our devoted care can bring it to full flower. So, let this holiday season be for us a time of rededication.
Even as we rejoice, however, let us remember that for some Americans, this will not be as happy a Christmas as it should be. I know a little of what they feel. I remember one Christmas Eve during the Great Depression, my father opening what he thought was a Christmas greeting. It was a notice that he no longer had a job.
A few months before he took up residence in this house, one of my predecessors, John Kennedy, tried to sum up the temper of the times with a quote from an author closely tied to Christmas, Charles Dickens. We were living, he said, in the best of times and the worst of times. Well, in some ways that's even more true today. The world is full of peril, as well as promise. Too many of its people, even now, live in the shadow of want and tyranny.
As I speak to you tonight, the fate of a proud and ancient nation hangs in the balance. For a thousand years, Christmas has been celebrated in Poland, a land of deep religious faith, but this Christmas brings little joy to the courageous Polish people. They have been betrayed by their own government.
The men who rule them and their totalitarian allies fear the very freedom that the Polish people cherish. They have answered the stirrings of liberty with brute force, killings, mass arrests, and the setting up of concentration camps. Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders are imprisoned, their fate unknown. Factories, mines, universities, and homes have been assaulted.
The target of this [repression] is the Solidarity Movement, but in attacking Solidarity its enemies attack an entire people. Ten million of Poland's 36 million citizens are members of Solidarity. Taken together with their families, they account for the overwhelming majority of the Polish nation. By persecuting Solidarity the Polish Government wages war against its own people.
I urge the Polish Government and its allies to consider the consequences of their actions. How can they possibly justify using naked force to crush a people who ask for nothing more than the right to lead their own lives in freedom and dignity? Brute force may intimidate, but it cannot form the basis of an enduring society, and the ailing Polish economy cannot be rebuilt with terror tactics.
Yesterday, I met in this very room with Romuald Spasowski, the distinguished former Polish Ambassador who has sought asylum in our country in protest of the suppression of his native land. He told me that one of the ways the Polish people have demonstrated their solidarity in the face of martial law is by placing lighted candles in their windows to show that the light of liberty still glows in their hearts.
Ambassador Spasowski requested that on Christmas Eve a lighted candle will burn in the White House window as a small but certain beacon of our solidarity with the Polish people. I urge all of you to do the same tomorrow night, on Christmas Eve, as a personal statement of your commitment to the steps we're taking to support the brave people of Poland in their time of troubles.
Once, earlier in this century, an evil influence threatened that the lights were going out all over the world. Let the light of millions of candles in American homes give notice that the light of freedom is not going to be extinguished. We are blessed with a freedom and abundance denied to so many. Let those candles remind us that these blessings bring with them a solid obligation, an obligation to the God who guides us, an obligation to the heritage of liberty and dignity handed down to us by our forefathers and an obligation to the children of the world, whose future will be shaped by the way we live our lives today.
Christmas means so much because of one special child. But Christmas also reminds us that all children are special, that they are gifts from God, gifts beyond price that mean more than any presents money can buy. In their love and laughter, in our hopes for their future lies the true meaning of Christmas.
So, in a spirit of gratitude for what we've been able to achieve together over the past year and looking forward to all that we hope to achieve together in the years ahead, Nancy and I want to wish you all the best of holiday seasons. As Charles Dickens, whom I quoted a few moments ago, said so well in "A Christmas Carol," "God bless us, every one."
As Reagan spoke I looked at my small children aged 2, 4, and 6 scattered about on the floor, eyeing the tree across the room already surrounded by gifts as their mother wrapped more. I couldn’t help but see the contradiction in my circumstances with those living six time zones east in Poland. We put a candle in our front window that night for the people of Poland.
I wondered then and continue to wonder today why Americans don’t get on their knees every day to thank God who for whatever reason – certainly not for deserving it – has blessed this country so much among the nations of the world.
I wonder if any public official today would use the terms Reagan used so openly above to talk about the “first Christmas in Bethlehem” two millennia ago, the “divinity of the child born,” who could perform miracles, who “chose to come among us as a helpless babe,” and that “Christmas means so much because of one special child”?
The world into which Jesus was born was under the boot of the Roman Empire whose cruelty would make Nazism pale in comparison. Prophets had foretold his coming for over a thousand years:
For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; and the government will rest on His shoulders; and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of His government.
It is an extravagant promise, don’t you think?
Yet, in the 32 years since Reagan gave his sunny address on the meaning of Christmas in a world about to explode, the secular elites have done their best to drive Christ out of Christmas. If Christmas weren’t already a holiday, they would prevent its becoming one. A crèche is now a desecration of the public square. When I was a child in public school, we began every day’s class with a Bible reading by the teacher and a prayer. The secular elites have ended that practice with a perversion of the First Amendment, using the State to bar religion instead of barring the State from sponsoring a religion. But that’s precisely what secular elitism is – a religion. Except that its religion tolerates no character claiming to be God, Prince of Peace, or the creator of a government that will increase without end.
Secular elitism rejects such outlandish claims. But that rejection was also foretold by prophets more than a thousand years before the miraculous birth in Bethlehem.
For He grew up … like a tender shoot, like a root out of parched ground; He has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon Him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him. He was despised and rejected – a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care.
God knew He would be rejected by the world. But He came anyway.
Why?
Because if God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. If God carried a wallet, your picture would be in it. Your birthday would be circled if God kept a calendar. And if God lived in a house, one of its rooms would be specifically designated as yours.
No matter what we think of God, that’s what He thinks of us.
Merry Christmas!
