The Mad Monarchist: Christmas, A Royal Holiday

Infant of Prague

Christmas, for those who do not know, is a very monarchy-oriented holiday. Once upon a time, Christians would have taken such a fact for granted but, these days, it probably needs to be stated outright. The birth of Christ was foretold by the Israelite prophecies of a coming savior king as part of the sacred royal line. The prophecies, as most should know from the traditional stories, was that, on this day “a king” would be born and born in the City of David, the foundational monarch of the sacred line of Israel and their most famous monarch. The heralds proclaimed that “a king is born” and we have the three wise men, sometimes themselves referred to as “the three kings” who came to do homage to this new monarch. The story even has a royal villain in the person of King Herod who launched a campaign of infanticide to remove this potential threat to his crown. All of this is why, in the Catholic tradition at least, there is the figure of the Divine Child as a monarch, probably most famously illustrated by the Infant of Prague. None of these facts should surprise anyone, yet few seldom think about how dripping with royalism the holiday of Christmas is. And, it goes far beyond the time and place of the birth of Christ.

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