Was Nothing Holy?

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A few of us recall tales told by our immigrant grandparents. My grandfather, who was bitter about this to his dying day, described his first Christmas Eve in America. A hired farm hand, he was forced to shovel frozen cow manure out of a barn on a bitter Colorado night, the icy blast off the dry plains chilling his bones and his spirit. He never got over it. It wasn’t the hard, even brutal, and, to his grandchildren, demeaning work that got to him—that was to be his lot for years. By then, he had already learned that.

The new country, this America, didn’t have streets paved with gold. His bewildered, poor family had been greeted by no welcoming committee. Those in Nebraska, then Colorado, who worked the immigrants but also derided them (at least some did), mocked his awkward attempts to speak the English language. But it wasn’t that which still rankled decades later. It was that he had to work Christmas Eve. Was nothing holy?

—Jean Bethke Elshtain, Books & Culture, Vol. 4, no. 3.

See: Leviticus 25:35; Deuteronomy 10:19; Matthew 25:35.

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