The joy of a faith- and family-oriented Christmas seems nearly impossible to find in these days of commercialized glitz. But it does exist in Old Salem, a restored seventeenth-century Moravian village nestle in the heart of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Authentic to the core, Old Salem's gentle dignity is seen in the ninety restored and reconstructed red-brick buildings, streets with no stoplights (just simple reminder bumps), and costumed craftsmen demonstrating work skills of bygone days. Old Salem presents a living history lesson: Visitors can witness how tinsmiths, silversmiths, basket-weavers, shoemakers, dyers, tanners, potters, and cabinetmakers carved out a place in the Piedmont wilderness in which to live in harmony and love.
December visitors will find a very special Christmas experience for the entire family. The aromas of freshly baked cookies and bread, and of powerful but irresistible coffee, tantalize those who have come to enjoy the holiday sights and sounds. The music is unique - brass bands in the streets and harpsichordists, organists, vocal ensembles, and sing-along songs - inside the houses. Moravians founded the first symphony orchestras in colonial America. The repertoire included the works of Haydn, Mozart, and other great European composers, as well as serious compositions by Moravian colonists.
Moravians are members of a very old Protestant group that today claims a worldwide membership of 360,000, most of whom are first- or second-generation Germans. The movement is traced back to Jan Hus, a Czech patriot and preacher who called for church reform and was burned at the stake in 1415 for heresy. His call for a Christocentric faith that stressed an individual's responsibility before God led to the founding, four decades later, of the Moravians' Unity of Brethren, the Unitas Fratrum. For almost two hundred years, the Unitas Fratrum played an important role in the life of Bohemia and the adjoining province of Moravia.
It 1501 the movement published the first Protestant hymnal as well as a version of the Bible still used by Czech-speaking people. At the beginning of the Reformation, the group had a membership of 200,000 in four hundred congregations.
Eventually, members of the Moravian Church left Germany, settling as missionaries in such diverse places as Greenland and Africa. Many missionaries came to America in 1735, settling first in Georgia. As the Brethren were opposed to the use of firearms, the antagonisms between British colonists and Spaniards in Florida caused them to move to Pennsylvania and found the settlement of Bethlehem in 1753.
Claudia Sink, a Winston-Salem native and history buff, says that twelve single Brethren left Bethlehem in 1753 and eventually formed the oldest congregation of the Moravian Church in the South. "The men lived in a crude hut and went about clearing the land and putting up buildings. Only then did they return for the women." The hymn the tired, thankful men sang upon their arrival begins like this:
We hold arrival love feast here
In Carolina land.
A company of brethren true,
A little pilgrim
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