Beneath the Starlit Sky: The Grave and Gladdening Joys of December

The Holy Family, detail of the Met's
Annual Angel Tree & Neapolitan crèche

December arrives cloaked in the long night, ushering in the solemn days of Advent. Its joys are fashioned in the chiaroscuro of winter and faith. To those formed by the old Catholic imagination, this season steadies the soul, reminding us that every true consolation is born of solemnity.

The month begins beneath the sign of holy protectors, when San Nicola di Bari passes in the cold dawn, bearing not commercial affection but the ancient charity that guards children and the poor. Soon after rises the Feast of the Immaculate Conception—Our Lady untouched by stain—casting a pale, pure light upon a darkened world. And then comes Santa Lucia di Siracusa, luminous martyr of sight, her feast a quiet flame against the encroaching winter.

And this year, the winter solstice bears a deeper weight, for it marks the 2,500th anniversary of Naples—Neapolis, the ancient city whose nativity has long been bound to the turning of light, when the longest night gives way to the slow return of day. Such cosmic thresholds remind the soul that renewal is always preceded by darkness.

Advent moves toward its climax, drawing the faithful through deepening night toward the dawn of the Incarnation. All the while, the cold deepens, the earth hardens, and the year’s breath grows thin. Yet this severity prepares the heart for the Nativity, that austere tenderness born in the holy crèche. Christmas, in its original gravity, is not tinsel but revelation—God entering the world through poverty, silence, and straw. And with the Nativity begins the season of Christmas, not a momentary festivity but a solemn tide of days, radiant in their quiet holiness.

And December bears another remembrance for those who have not forgotten the buried nobility of Christendom: the passing of the Servant of God King Francesco II of the Two Sicilies, a monarch who suffered ruin with Catholic dignity and died in exile with the serenity of the just. His memory lingers like incense—faint, persistent, mournful.

Then at last the year declines toward its own ending. The final days stand like sentinels, bidding us to take stock of what has passed into shadow within us, and what may still rise again. And even as the world prepares its festivities—the crowded squares, the fireworks, the cities bracing for their midnight clamor—a deeper quiet gathers beneath it all, the old hush that attends the turning of time. The new year approaches—a sacred threshold—not with the roar of revelers but with the hush of possibility.

Thus, December, in its somber grandeur, offers a joy unlike any other, carved from winter’s darkness—a joy that teaches the soul to hope precisely when the world seems coldest.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, December 1st, Feast of San Carlo de Foucauld