Patrick Comerford
On the fifth day of Christmas my true love sent to me … ‘five golden rings, four colly birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree’.
This is the fifth day of Christmas and the calendar of the Church of England today remembers the Holy Innocents. The Festival of The Holy Innocents is usually observed on 28 December, and was observed in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church, Stony Stratford, yesterday. But many churches and parishes marked yesterday as the first Sunday of Christmas, and for them the observance has been moved to today (Monday 29 December 2025).
If the Holy Innocents were commemorated yesterday, then the Church of England remembers Thomas Becket (1170), Archbishop of Canterbury and Martyr, today. The calendar of Eastern Orthodox Church also remembers the Holy Innocents on 29 December.
Before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, to reflect, to pray and to read in these ways:
1, today’s Gospel reading;
2, a short reflection;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
Matthew 2: 13-18 (NRSVA):
13 Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.’ 14 Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, 15 and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son.’
16 When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. 17 Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:
18 ‘A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’
Today’s Reflections:
The Christian interpretation of the song ‘The 12 Days of Christmas’ often sees the five gold or golden rings as figurative representations of the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), the Pentateuch or the Torah.
It is theologically important to remind ourselves in the days after Christmas Day of the important link between the Incarnation and bearing witness to the Resurrection faith.
Saint Stephen’s Day on Friday (26 December), Holy Innocents’ Day (usually 28 December), and the commemoration of Thomas à Beckett (usually today, 29 December), are reminders that Christmas, far from being surrounded by sanitised images of the crib, angels and wise men, is followed by martyrdom and violence. When the Church Calendar recalls the massacre of the Holy Innocents, they are sometimes revered as the first Christian martyrs.
These dates have nothing to do with the chronological order of the event. Instead, the Holy Innocents are remembered within the octave of Christmas because they gave their life for the new-born Saviour. Saint Stephen the first martyr (martyr by will, love and blood, 26 December), Saint John the Evangelist (27 December, martyr by will and love), and these first flowers of the Church (martyrs by blood alone) accompany the Christ Child entering this world on Christmas Day.
This commemoration first appears as a feast of the western church at the end of the fifth century, and the earliest commemorations were connected with the Feast of the Epiphany (6 January), bringing together the murder of the Innocents and the visit of the Magi.
The story of the massacre of the Innocents is the biblical narrative of infanticide by King Herod the Great in today’s Gospel reading (Matthew 2: 13-18). According to Saint Matthew’s Gospel, Herod ordered the execution of all young male children in the village of Bethlehem to save him from losing his throne to a new-born king whose birth had been announced to him by the Magi.
In Saint Matthew’s Gospel, the visiting magi from the east arrive in Judea in search of the new-born king of the Jews, having ‘observed his star at its rising’ (Matthew 2: 2). Herod directs them to Bethlehem, and asks them to let him know who this king is when they find him. They find the Christ Child and honour him, but an angel tells them not to alert Herod, and they return home by another way. Meanwhile, Joseph has taken Mary and the Christ Child and they have fled to Egypt.
Saint Matthew’s Gospel provides the only account of the Massacre. This incident is not mentioned in the other three gospels, nor is it mentioned by the Jewish historian Josephus, who records Herod’s murder of his own sons. When the Emperor Augustus heard that Herod had ordered the murder of his own sons, he remarked: ‘It is better to be Herod’s pig, than his son.’
Saint Matthew’s story recalls passages in Hosea referring to the exodus, and in Jeremiah referring to the Babylonian exile, and the accounts in Exodus of the birth of Moses and the slaying of the first-born children by Pharaoh.
Estimates of the number of infants at the time in Bethlehem, a town with a total population of about 1,000, would be about 20. But Byzantine liturgy estimated 14,000 Holy Innocents were murdered, while an early Syrian list of saints put the number at 64,000. Coptic sources raise the number to 144,000 and also place the event on 29 December.
In previous years, Christian CND and the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship have come together to mark Holy Innocents’ Day and to pray for peace with prayers, readings, singing and reflections on all the innocent victims of war and violence, especially children. This morning, as I reflect on the day ahead, my heart is weighed down by the plight of the children who have been caught in war and violence in Gaza, Isreal and Palestine, in Syria and Lebanon, and in Ukraine and Russia, the forgotten child refugees on Greek islands, in Lampedusa and in Calais, in cheap hotels across this land and across Europe, and the child refugees and innocent children who have become the victims of the appalling decisions about to be made by the Trump regime in the past year.
It was distressing, to say the least, to read a report by my former colleague Helena Smith from Athens in the Guardian last Christmas of a refugee ‘children’s emergency’ facing Greece, where the number of unaccompanied minors reaching the country rising and concerns growing over a lack of ‘safe zones’ to host them.
Large numbers of children arrived last year (2025) along a new trafficking route from Libya to Crete, prompting NGOs to urge Greek authorities to take emergency measures that would allow children to be transferred to protected shelters or other EU member states.
‘What we are seeing amounts to a children’s emergency of the kind that we haven’t witnessed in years,’ said Sofia Kouvelaki, who heads the Home Project, an organisation that supports refugee and migrant children in Athens.
Ten years after Greece was at the centre of a refugee crisis, when nearly a million EU-bound asylum seekers crossed its borders, child arrivals had doubled last year, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR. More than 13,000 minors arrived in Greece by sea in the first 11 months of thats year. Landings by unaccompanied and separated children have also risen sharply, from 1,490 in 2023 to approximately 3,000 so far this year.
‘There are a huge number of kids turning up on boats every day and an urgent need for the creation of more safe spaces to house them,’ Sofia Kouvelaki said. Recent arrivals referred to the Home Project included exceptionally young children from Syria and Egypt.
Greece’s migration minister, Nikos Panagiotopoulos, predicted last Christmas that pressure on east Mediterranean migration routes to Greece was likely to continue this year (2025). By the end of last year, 60,000 people had entered Greece, and camps on the Aegean islands were at full capacity, he said.
Aid groups report hundreds of children on the frontline isles of Samos, Leros and Kos without clothes or shoes and little or no access to essential services. Spending cuts by the Greek government resulted in fewer protective shelters and about 1,500 unaccompanied children were forced to fend for themselves throughout Greece. Incidents of violence and abuse proliferated in overcrowded state-run reception facilities that frequently host children and adults together. There were shocking reports of a teenager from Egypt being gang-raped, beaten and burned at the Malakasa refugee camp outside Athens.
Save the Children and other aid organisations report critical failures in Greece’s reception system, overcrowding in camps and asylum seeker facilities, shortages in basic services, placing children at risk as their asylum requests are put on EU funding is blocked from reaching shelters.
The Greek Council for Refugees and Save the Children reported alarming living conditions that minors continue to face in the camps. ‘It is unacceptable that, even now, when so much money has been invested in Greece and we are no longer in crisis mode, that we should be discussing such basic issues,’ according to Lefteris Papagiannakis, the director of the Greek Council for Refugees.
The situation has continued to deteriorate in the past 12 months. Last month (November 2025), the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) and the European Council for Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) submitted comments to the European Committee of Social Rights (ECSR) on the follow-up to the collective complaint ICJ and ECRE v Greece. Their submission details several aspects of Greece’s continuing non-compliance with the European Social Charter (ESC) concerning the rights of migrant and refugee children.
Their concerns include continued resort to detention or detention-like restrictions of migrant and refugee children as a substitute for reception; prolonged confinement in what should be ‘safe zones’ with unrelated adults; persistent substandard reception conditions on the islands; the continued lack of appropriate shelter for unaccompanied children on the mainland; recurrent barriers to healthcare and schooling; a deficient current age-assessment framework; concerns about medical tests, lengthy appeal deadlines; and violations of children’s rights.
Malcolm Guite is a Cambridge poet and priest. At the request of King Charles, one of his poems was read by Dame Kristin Scott Thomas on the Sunday before Christmas (21 December) at the Chapel Royal Carol Service:
We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,
Or cosy in a crib beside the font,
But he is with a million displaced people
On the long road of weariness and want.
For even as we sing our final carol
His family is up and on that road,
Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel,
Glancing behind and shouldering their load.
Whilst Herod rages still from his dark tower
Christ clings to Mary, fingers tightly curled,
The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power,
And death squads spread their curse across the world.
But every Herod dies, and comes alone
To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.
Today’s Prayers (Monday 29 December 2025, the Holy Innocents):
The theme this week (28 December 2025 to 3 January 2026) in Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Mother and Child’ (pp 14-15). This theme was introduced yesterday with a Programme Update by Imran Englefield, Individual Giving Manager, USPG.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (Monday 29 December 2025) invites us to pray:
God of compassion, we continue to ask that you bless the faith and dedication of those working at Mvumi.
The Collect:
Heavenly Father,
whose children suffered at the hands of Herod,
though they had done no wrong:
by the suffering of your Son
and by the innocence of our lives
frustrate all evil designs
and establish your reign of justice and peace;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
Lord Jesus Christ,
in your humility you have stooped to share our human life
with the most defenceless of your children:
may we who have received these gifts of your passion
rejoice in celebrating the witness of the Holy Innocents
to the purity of your sacrifice
made once for all upon the cross;
for you are alive and reign, now and for ever.
Yesterday’s Reflections
Continued Tomorrow
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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