t spangle Bethlehem with frost
are generally regarded by the learned merely as vulgar lies.
At best they are regarded as popular fictions, like that which made
the shepherds in the Nativity Play talk a broad dialect of Somerset.
In the deepest sense of course this democratic tradition is truer
than most history. But even in the cruder and more concrete sense the
tradition about the December snow is not quite so false as is suggested.
It is not a mere local illusion for Englishmen to picture
the Holy Child in a snowstorm, as it would be for the Londoners
to picture him in a London fog. There can be snow in Jerusalem,
and there might be snow in Bethlehem; and when we penetrate to the idea
behind the image, we find it is not only possible but probable.
In Palestine, at least in these mountainous parts of Palestine,
men have the same general sentiment about the seasons as in the West
or the North. Snow is a rarity, but winter is a reality.
Whether we regard it as the divine purpose of a mystery or the human
purpose of a myth, the purpose of putting such a feast in winter
would be just the same in Bethlehem as it would be in Balham.
Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean
by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer
sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.

In other words, the semi-tropical nature of the place, like its
vulgarity and desecration, can be, and are, enormously exaggerated.
But it is always hard to correct the exaggeration without exaggerating
the correction. It would be absurd seriously to deny that Jerusalem
is an Eastern town; but we may say it was Westernised without
being modernised. Anyhow, it was medievalised before it was modernised.
And in the same way it would be absurd to deny that Jerusalem
is a Southern town, in the sense of being normally out of the way
of snowstorms, but the truth can be suggested by saying that it
has always known the quality of snow, but not the quantity.
And the quantity of snow that fell on this occasion would have
been something striking and even sensational in Sussex or Kent.
And yet another way of putting the proportions of the thing would
be to say that Jerusalem has been besieged more often and by more
different kinds of people than any town upon the globe; that it has
been besieged by Jews and Assyrians, Egyptians and Babylonians, Greeks
and Romans, Persians and Saracens, Frenchmen and Englishmen