The Fourth Day of Christmas: the Holy Innocents

Happy fourth day of Christmas! Today we pause our revels for a moment to remember and celebrate the Holy Innocents.

When Herod realized that he had been deceived by the magi, he became furious. He ordered the massacre of all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had ascertained from the magi.

Then was fulfilled what had been said through Jeremiah the prophet:

“A voice was heard in Ramah,
sobbing and loud lamentation;
Rachel weeping for her children,
and she would not be consoled,
since they were no more.”

(Matthew 2:16-18)

From the venerable Catholic Encyclopedia:

This cruel deed of Herod is not mentioned by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, although he relates quite a number of atrocities committed by the king during the last years of his reign. The number of these children was so small that this crime appeared insignificant amongst the other misdeeds of Herod.

Macrobius relates that when Augustus heard that amongst the boys of two years and under Herod’s own son also had been massacred, he said: “It is better to be Herod’s hog [ous], than his son [houios],” alluding to the Jewish law of not eating, and consequently not killing, swine. …

[T]he feast is kept within the octave of Christmas because the Holy Innocents gave their life for the newborn Saviour. Stephen the first martyr (martyr by will, love, and blood), John, the Disciple of Love (martyr by will and love), and these first flowers of the Church (martyrs by blood alone) accompany the Holy Child Jesus entering this world on Christmas day.

This is the event that forced the Holy Family to be refugees, fleeing from the Roman Client Kingdom of Judea to the relative safety of Roman Egypt, on the warning of the angel.

Fun liturgical fact: this feast once had an octave, and it was permissible to wear rose-coloured vestments on the octave day, making it only the third day of the year where this was permitted.

However, on the eighth day of Holy Innocents she uses rose color. Rose is red tempered by white. Red is the martyr’s sign; white the vane of peace and truth and innocence. Thus the Church indicates by the choice of this color on the eighth day, that at the termination of their course of martyrdom these little ones obtain the heavenly reward of innocence; they are virgins that have passed through the purifying process of a singular baptism by blood … white and red commingled mark the color of our little Innocents in fair, scarce-blushing rose.

(The American Ecclesiastical Review, in 1902)

Read the full story over at Aleteia.