The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Innocents day 29th december who is innocent today

Evangelical Universalism
#1

Munching through my Turkey Sandwich it occurs to me this thread for the 29th coming up soon, Innocents Day, which here in Spain we celebrate as Brits do on April Fool’s Day. Here we are fooled as Innocents.

The daily newspapers make a great thing of this with credible front story news and/or pictures - the best I can remember being sensational news about the Christopher Columbus monument in Barcelona in the square at the end of one of the main streets in Barcelona Las Ramblas as the city opens out to the waters of its port. Columbus slightly higher than Nelson in London, points with his finger to the Mediterranean southwards…

On Innocents Day, some years ago the Hoja de Lunes, the only paper in those days published on Mondays, gave as front page news that Columbus finger was pointing downwards and that the monument was leaning s slightly leaning over. No photo, just big headlines!

"Innocent " crowds massed down the Ramblas boulevard to check this out!! :laughing:

The difference with April fools day, when foolery stops at noon, the opportunity for a laugh in Spain lasts the full 24 hours of the 29th.

This thread offers the opportunity for a laugh :laughing: on the day itself, as well as some discussion on Herod’s cruel cleansing of the Innocents and the Holy Family’s escape to Egypt.

Mchael in Barcelona

#2

I never heard of “Innocents Day” before! It seems very ironic that a kind of April Fools Day is held on the traditional day to commemorate those children killed by Herod. We also have this use of “innocent” as pertaining to someone not knowledgeable in the ways of the world, so to speak. We don’t use it that way much, though, as here (in the USA) “innocent” usually just means someone who is pure and of course is the opposite of “guilty.”

But . . . a couple of April Fool’s Day memories. One year my mom dipped heavy paper circles in pancake batter and cooked them up for us. It was very hard to cut these pancakes and it took us a while to figure out what she’d done. Did she ever have a laugh over that! But being tender-hearted she also had a nice batch of real pancakes ready for us. I wasn’t sure I wanted to try another one, though!

My birthday is in April, and I had been wanting and wanting a horse. We lived out in the country and were reasonably well off, so this wasn’t an impossible wish. My dad found a nice horse for a good price and though my birthday hadn’t come yet, he brought it home on April 1st as a big surprise for me. I didn’t remember it was April 1st, so I didn’t suspect anything, and indeed there was no fooling about the horse. I could hardly get my brothers to come look at it though, because they thought I was April Fooling them. Ah well, it was funny at the time. :laughing:

The story of Herod’s massacre always stood out for me as a horrible blot on the Christmas story. I always wondered why God didn’t save ALL the children, but I suppose He actually DID save them all, and their grieving parents too. Still it’s a harsh thing to think about. The world today is often bad, but I think things are gradually getting better – two steps forward, one step back. It’s a slow process, but the days are gone in most of the world when a king could get away with such a heinous crime. Thank God for that!

Love, Cindy