It’s been a bleak year, but such years are nothing new in human history. People have faced tough times in the past. I won't say tougher, because the challenges of history are always different, forcing people to deal with the unknown and the uncomfortable. It is in the pit of despair that the Christmas message of hope reborn and renewed resonates, a message that is symbolised in a miraculous birth: a king born in the lowliest of circumstances, destined for death and resurrection. The most testing of circumstances only serves to intensify the meaning of that symbolism. I still can’t get used to no singing and no music at my local church, and how few people are there, distanced, and behind masks. But the greater truths are always the most intangible. The slenderest knowledge of the highest things is worth a whole lot more than the more certain knowledge of the immediately accessible. I’m not sure that the carols will be sung at Midnight Mass at my church this year. There has been no singing for the best part of a year now. The carol singing is always a highlight, an hour singing those old stalwarts. We know the words, though, and their meaning is all the richer this year. Meditating upon the bleak midwinter, and upon the infant child lying in the manger, poet Christina Rossetti asked and answered,
What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.
It’s been a year in which mental and physical health – not to mention to social and economic fabric – has been stretched to breaking point and beyond. I've just been reading Neil Oliver saying that the broken are being ignored and left to cope as best they can, which is hardly at all. People are under immense pressure. I know this from working in my own community, people are just so glad just to see a familiar face and wait for me, coming to the door or waving from windows. I've been pushed to the limits myself, but have been glad to raise the spirits of others. When circumstances are as straitened as they are now, then you have to hack out the little victories that every day offers, grasp every moment of joy and celebrate it, and give thanks for the wonder that never ends.
I constantly recall the words of G.K. Chesterton, a man who suffered continuous depression, and who came close to giving up:
“I had wandered to a position not very far from the phrase of my Puritan grandfather, when he said that he would thank God for his creation [even] if he were a lost soul. I hung on to religion by one thin thread of thanks ... At the back of our brains ... there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man might suddenly understand that he was alive, and be happy.”
Chesterton didn’t give his ticket to the universe back; he kept on keeping on. And that’s the Christmas message of a hope reborn and renewed every year : we carry on dreaming and carry on loving, because deep down we 'know' that there is a transcendent source and end of all things. There have been worse times than this, and there may well be worse to come - the daily crises and the campaigns raising awareness about them seem to be an obituary to the species. Are the campaigns ever going to get round to the work of reconstruction? The Christmas message endures: however bleak the circumstances we face, there will be better.
As Jonathan Sacks writes in The Politics of Hope:
Isaiah's 'Seek justice, encourage the oppressed, defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow', or Micah's 'What does the Lord require of you but to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with your God?' are not revolutionary programmes. They are reminders that with every act of kindness we undertake, every virtue we develop, every love we translate into life, we help to mend a fractured world and make society a little more just, a little less abrasive and inhumane.
Sacks 2000 ch 22
Some are utterly without hope. This could be a realistic appraisal of our predicament, it could be chronic crisis fatigue, or it could be a defence mechanism, shutting out hard realities about which we think we can do nothing. I know the hard realities but nevertheless continue to argue for hope:
Without food man can survive for barely thirty days; without water for little more than three days; without air hardly for more than three minutes: but without hope he might destroy himself in an even shorter time.
Mumford 1952: 30
We are not the first generation to be confronted with an apparently hopeless situation, and we won’t be the last. The subjective factor is the factor that changes the direction of objective trends and tendencies:
Reason often has told man he was defeated: why should the prisoner, the slave, the corrupted and the deformed and the ailing all go on with so few exceptions to their dismal end?
Mumford 1952: 30-31
Pushed too far, reason undermines life at its source. For Mumford, only the acceptance of a mystery beyond the compass of reason keeps human life from becoming devaluated and the spirit from becoming discouraged over the seemingly incontrovertible facts reported by reason - and by an endless campaigning that catastrophizes every event. (see Mumford 1944 ch 1).
We keep digging for that submerged sun of wonder.
I have to say at this point I sing a very nice version of Perry Como’s Christmas Dream. Terrible video quality, but there’s no hiding the quality of the voice …
An English tradition (I read) involved the baking of a mince pie in the shape of a manger, which would hold baby Jesus until dinnertime came, at which time the pie was promptly eaten. It’s a tradition I feel like restoring. I have, in recent years, had a pie on Christmas Day, a vegetarian pie made by none other than Linda McCartney, God bless her. The pies have gone down a bit in recent years, though, so I opt for a vegetarian roast. But I do like a nice pie. When the Puritans banned Christmas and Christmas celebrations in 1647, on account of the boisterous nature of the festivities and its associations with the old Catholic faith, they also passed laws which banned these pies, calling them “idolaterie in crust.” So I guess I am just an inveterate idolater who can’t resist anything with a crust and a top. And lashings of thick gravy.
I feel like reviving this tradition of Nativity ‘pies.’ Come to think of it, I already have, having had a pie for Christmas dinner on more than a few occasions since 2006.
Pies aside, I do rather cherish a good Nativity scene and set. I have three back home. One dates back to 1972 and was set up every Christmas until 2006. My mother died in the March of that year, and the Christmas decorations just seemed to disappear. I asked my dad what he had done with them and he couldn’t remember. All the baubles, trinkets, and tinsel had disappeared. So had the tree in fact! It was a most perplexing mystery. The old nativity had disappeared too, which made me sad. I had visions of it all being buried and crushed in being packed away, or having been just plain thrown away. It didn’t bear thinking about. And so I waited to see if my dad could manage to remember where it had all gone. And waited and waited. Christmas effectively disappeared in the aftermath of my mother’s death in 2006. Christmases were pretty grim from that point on, with no decorations in the house. Christmases came and went, and I kept on waiting.
In 2015 I had been invited to spend Christmas Day with my auntie and uncle and various family members. My dad was invited, too. At the last minute, the evening of Christmas Eve, my dad received a call to say that there was not enough room in the house, not enough chairs, and so I was out. Lovely! I could have brought my own chair. But there it was. I spent Christmas Day of 2015 entirely on my own. My dad was picked up early in the morning, when I was still in bed, (recovering after rocking out at Midnight Mass the night before, lots of carol singing), and returned sometime after 10-30pm.
In 2016 I finally gave up wishing and hoping and waiting for the return of the Christmas past and decided to buy a new tree and new decorations and start anew. I bought a very big tree with lots of decorations, in fact. And looking on the Internet I also managed to find an old nativity set with exactly the same figures that I now accepted had gone for good, from 1972, brand new and still in the box. I made a very handsome investment in obtaining this set, doing my best to recover the traditional family Christmas we all knew and loved. It all looked good, at least what I saw of it. A week before Christmas I suffered a massive heart attack and spent Christmas in intensive care. I didn’t even get a chance to unpack the new nativity of all the old figures. And when I did get the chance, I decided to save them for the next Christmas, thankful that this had not proven to be my last Christmas. As I lay in my hospital bed, news came on TV that George Michael had died. It was his Last Christmas. 'Poor George’ I said to the nurse, as she checked that I was still alive. She briefly looked at the TV and made no comment, getting on with her job. Life and death is all in a day’s work in a hospital. The nativity figures remained in the box under the tree for what remained of Christmas (admittedly, I stretched it out a bit. I stretched it out a lot, in fact). By some genius I managed to spend Christmas alone again. Or not quite alone. I got a priest of my own and celebrated mass in my bed. And I got a visit from a nice young woman who was visiting people alone at Christmas and handing out Christmas presents to we the lost, the forlorn, and the abandoned. I got deodorants and soap. It’s the thought that counts. It had me thinking that people were alone at Christmas possibly suffered from a condition even their friends wouldn’t tell them about. But I enjoyed the visits. She had a nice smile and a cheery disposition, doing good works for those in need of cheering up at Christmas. It was good to see someone. And there was a brass band playing Christmas carols down the corridor too. So it was better than the previous year.
In 2017 it was the turn of my brother to be in hospital. He went down with pneumonia just before Christmas. But I did manage to celebrate the new tree dressed in all its finery. It was a very good Christmas. And then, miraculously, come 2018, shortly before Christmas, all the old decorations reappeared in bags in a cupboard in the upstairs front room. I swear I had searched that cupboard. Maybe not too much. I didn’t want to search at the stuff that was buried, on the assumption that if the balls and baubles and things were among the things at the bottom, then they were crushed and broken, which was an image that deeply saddened me. I didn't want to see that and preferred not to know. But here they were once more, old friends with precious memories of Christmases past and family members no longer with us. I never did find out the story behind their miraculous reappearance, but reappear they did. And I found the old nativity set in the bags, too. The Christ child, Mary and Joseph, the three wise men, the shepherd with a lamb round his neck, two sheep and a couple of cows, and the angel that we could never quite get to hang up without falling down. This made for some awkward choices to be made, not least because the doppelgangers were actually considerably bigger, but had extra figures, including a horn player, a worshipper kneeling in awe, a servant, and, the real clincher, an enormous and very attractive camel. At the same time, the bond with the old figures goes back to the Christmases of my youth and is unbreakable. So I have a nativity in different rooms. We used to have it in the front window, lit up for all the neighbours to see. The postmen and women like this kind of thing (I do).
2018 was a great Christmas, very warm, with new memories mingling with the old. I can place the old decorations on the tree. Some of these belonged to my grandmother. I remember the ones going back to the seventies. My favourite is the green cone shaped one. It was one of a set of six, bought some time in the early seventies. I remember them well, all green, all different shapes, some with frost and snow on them, all shiny and attractive. A couple were broken early on. And one by one the rest followed. But this simple cone one, the least attractive in many ways, remains and is much loved. Every bauble a memory. I’m glad I recovered and renewed the old Christmas spirit in 2018. I shot films and took photos.
I’ve been out in search of extra animals this year. I always loved Nancy Faber’s Nativity set, which boasts a large collection of animals, to which she adds more animals each year. In a world in which habitats are in retreat and lots of species are in decline, it’s a nice idea, another meaningful symbol, a declaration of intent, a commitment of friendship and kinship with all animals.
Nancy is from Kenly, N.C. and attends Centenary United Methodist Church in Smithfield, N.C. “We love our wooden manger scene,” she says. “The set is German made from the 1970s and we add animals yearly.” We had a shoe box covered with paper that had been dipped in brown and black paint and scrumpled up to look like a cave rather than a stable. Whilst I think that that was more accident than design given the availability of materials (and limitation of skills), that belief does actually reflect an old tradition. The Early Church Fathers wrote about Jesus being born in a cave. I see all these nativity sets for sale, and they are all so beautifully made and well done as to be somewhat less than believable. I like simplicity and realism, embellished by a very vivid imagination.
The tree is the first thing up and decorated each year. Then I ponder where the nativity will go. In 2017 I used the wood shavings from the door for straw. The front door stiffens up every winter, so I have to plane it down. I’ve been doing this for years. And every year I would ask my dad how this happens. I must have shaved half the door off by now, and yet every year it’s back to the same size and more, expanding in the cold so much it gets stuck. This is one of life’s many mysteries. But I took the plane to the door, as usual, and decided that the shavings could come in useful. Waste not, want not. I scattered the shavings on top of a box and arranged the figures among it all. It was a mess that got everywhere, with shavings all over the floor, but I suspect a stable is like that. I blame the Angel of the Lord for flapping her wings too much when I'm not looking.
Setting up the nativity always puts a smile on my face, not least because I can remember exactly when we acquired this very first one. It was a big occasion when we unwrapped it for the first time, and I’ve never lost that feeling of hope renewed as the scene is set up every year. It’s not, I have to admit, a particularly beautiful or well-made set. It’s not handcrafted and made out of the best materials. The cynical and the critical would most probably describe it as somewhat cheap, made in Hong Kong. But I don’t remotely care. There is immense love invested in each piece, growing with the memories of each passing year. And I don’t suppose the original stable was particularly well-made, either. Our original crib was made by my brother at Windleshaw Infants school. It was just a shoe box and paper dipped in paint and crumpled up and around. It did the job and looked good. Until it finally succumbed to time and fell apart. My angel, made in Miss Rigby's class, third year Windleshaw Infants, is still going strong though. She'll be fifty next Christmas. (Or is it this? I never could count).
It’s a special story that invites our own special stories. It’s all very precious. As Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout sings in Earth, the Story so Far:
There was a baby in a stable
Some say it was the Lord
Why if it's no more than a fable
Should it strike so deep a chord?
I think the pies have something to do with it. And the animals.
Peace on Earth. Heaven knows we need it.
The
