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Last Word - Christmas
This is a January reflection on Christmas.
It's always the same. Suddenly December comes and the holly, with or without berries, comes with it. I wonder what's happened to the ivy – perhaps it is about in some places and I don't notice it.
It is not just decorations. There were people going from shop to shop, looking for favourite things; sweet, chocolates, puddings (or the ingredients), and ordering turkeys, chickens, larger than usual, rolls of beef and so on. It would never do to be short of anything, would it?
We are told that much of what we think of as Christmas customs don't go back very far. Queen Victoria's consort, Albert, is said to have imported a fir tree. Scrooge, the miser, converted to Christmas generosity by nightmare horrors, sometimes to my aid – giving the perfect phrase to describe the more ludicrous commercial practices (e.g. automated reindeer (with or without red noses)) in shop windows. Perhaps “Bah humbug” is a bit archaic but at least, is a good substitute for the grinding of teeth which some of the more incredible solecisms about Christmas provoke.
It is, I suggest, too early to convict Christmas as a hi-jacking of a pagan festival, Yule logs and all, complete with snowmen and brandy soaking puddings. Rather akin to the idea of using Easter Eggs to evoke the rolling away of the stone as a symbol of the resurrection. Christians can simply look back at what Christmas is really all about.
It is not difficult to find the story in the Bible. A married couple and their enforced journey, under the tyranny of a king and an empire who simply wanted to find an easy way of levying a tax. The baby would have been born, taxes or not. The important thing was (and is) the birth. A birth in a stable, which marked a huge and still in many ways a mysterious event.
There will be many events this year to remind us that the world – and we – just as much as the people responsible for causing that desperate search for a birthplace, we bear some responsibility for creating circumstances which have made people homeless, with little hope of accommodation other than refugee camps, in tents or shanty towns.
It is not that we by our interventions intended to create the circumstances which have made people refugees. Nor is it easy for anyone to do anything to transform the situation to one in which people can find homes, work, healthcare, food – all the things we all need.
Where was the baby born in a manger this time? Might we find him in some forgotten corner where the displaced are desperately looking for shelter, even a tent where a baby could be born?
Bob Mclean
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