The reason for the season

Father Tom Voorhies shared the reason for Christmas season with Ville Platte Rotary Club members at the group’s December 6 meeting.
Voorhies said, “It is a fortuitous day. We are gathered here December the 6th, which is the Feast of St. Nicholas. He is the one that everybody calls Santa Claus.”
Tom Voorhies is the pastor of Sacred Heart Catholic Church.
Voorhies said St. Nicholas was a bishop in the 300s in what is present-day Turkey.
“He preached the name of Jesus, our Lord and also had to fight against the Aryan heresy that tried to say Jesus was not divine,” Voorhies said. “At a time when we celebrate the God man, Jesus Christ, God made flesh, there was a time when people were saying that he really was not God — he was a good guy, but he wasn’t God.
“He truly was and that is what makes this season so special.”
Voorhies also said that there is the question of what is more important, Christmas or Easter.
“We wouldn’t have an Easter without Christmas, but in the very beginning, the first thing preached was the dying, death and resurrection of our Jesus, our Lord.
“Easter was the first and main proclamation. It wasn’t until a bit later that the Christmas celebration came about.”
Voorhies said that in the 1200s, St. Francis of Assisi was the first to put a live manger scene together, and that is where the tradition of the nativity scene originated.
The tradition of Santa Claus was started later by the Dutch.
“It was St. Nicolaaus and his nick-name was Sinterklaas,” Voorhies said. “It was later anglicized by Dutch Protestants and in the United States to become Santa Claus.”
“Saint Nicholas is what you are really saying when you say Santa Claus.”
Voorhies said other St. Nick-related traditions began to come about through American writers.
Voorhies said, “There was a story about St. Nicholas throwing three bags of money into a man’s house because he had three daughters and they did not have dowry’s that they could be married off with and it would be a bad future for them. So he gave some money for them to be married off as they did in those days.
“That’s where the kind of gift giving becomes connected with Santa Claus.”
Voorhies said the gift giving started out on December 6 in a lot of northern European countries and in southern Europe, gifts were given on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, when the three kings came to give their gifts to Jesus.
“It was really in America that the gift giving started on December 25, but we know that Jesus is the true gift of all. We are so very blessed to have him.”
Voorhies said that Christmas does connect with Easter in a kind of prophecy of the Easter to come.
“If you do go down under the Church of the Nativity, which is built on top of this system of caves, where Jesus was born, there is a place where there is like a stone shelf that was probably used for his manger, where his body was laid in the very beginning — the prophecy of that tomb, where his body would be put, on a stone shelf.”
Voorhies also noted that Jesus was wrapped in swaddling clothes at his birth and in cloths at his death.
“Both events, Christmas and Easter, were announced by angels and also the word Bethlehem means house of bread,” Voorhies said. “Beth means house and lehem in Hebrew means bread. Bethlehem was the big wheat area of the Holy Land, so it was the bread basket of that area. And how appropriate that Jesus would later say, ‘I am the bread of life. Eat my body and drink my blood.’ He is that true bread of life.”
Voorhies said the Christmas story is all about family.
“Pope St. John Paul II said history and salvation passes by way of the family,” he said. “It is so very important for us that as we celebrate the holidays, we think about family.
“We come from the family of God. He is a family first before we were ever a family. He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and he invites and creates us in his image, in his likeness to be a family as well. Through this holy family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, salvation has come to the world.”
Sacred Heart Interact Club officers spoke to Rotary members at the November 29 meeting.
The club’s officers are: President Bailey Odom; Vice President - Kaylie McCoy; Secretary - Grace LeJeune; Treasurer - Katherine Brown; Photographer-Sydney Fontenot; Historian - Amber Guillory; and Lance Costanza-Sgt. at Arms. Club advisor Kimberly LeJeune also spoke during the event.
The school’s Interact Club has 86 members, and the students participate in community projects like hosting bingo games for the residents of Heritage Manor nursing home and keeping up the Sacred Heart Prayer Garden.