In defence of the traditional nativity play

Despite a seafood medley in the wings of some nativity plays, Yaroslav Walker still prefers the deep power of a more traditional telling.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

Three children dressed as orange lobsters stand sheepishly on a stage.

The nativity lobster scene, Love Actually.

“So what’s this big news, then?”

“We’ve been given our parts in the Nativity Play…[GASP]…and I’m the lobster!”

“The lobster?”

“Yeh!”

“In the Nativity Play!?”

“Yeh. First lobster.”

“There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?”

“Duh!”

I love this little exchange from Love Actually. Emma Thompson’s mother must be expressing the surprise of parents up and down the country for the last twenty years or so. When I was at primary school there was no doubt that when December rolled around, we would do a straight-down-the-line nativity play. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed that more and more schools have been experimenting: a lobster here, an octopus there, a modern re-telling with mobile phones and motorbikes, or abandoning the Gospel nativity entirely in favour of lovely (but not biblical) stories like The Elves and the Shoemaker.

I’ve not watched Love Actually in a few years, but this scene burst into my imagination as I was watching the Nativity Play of one of my local primary schools. It was the Christmas story without adulteration – Matthew and Luke would have no qualms about any of the details. Yes, there were jokes to entertain the parents, and the odd song that I doubt the people in Bethlehem were singing at the time, but overall, it was a Traditional Nativity Play in all its glory!

Stories are the preeminent vehicles of meaning, and so it stands to reason that a ‘traditional story’ has the most power in this regard.

As I sat through a delightful performance, I was struck by just how comforting it was to see a traditional telling of the Christmas story. When I got up to give a little homily after the show, I thanked the children profusely for their adherence to tradition, and explained how much it had cheered me. I was a little surprised to encounter just how many parents, as they left the church, concurred wholeheartedly with my statement. They were moved to hear that old tale told again, and moved more than they expected when they encountered those timeless themes that the nativity story encapsulates.

I’m not opposed to innovation and modernisation, but it strikes me that some traditions are sacrosanct – especially around a season like Christmas. Traditions aren’t just activities we perform semi-regularly; traditions are carriers of meaning, emotion, and memory, and traditions have a deep power we can’t always explain at the time. I’m sure most people reading this article will have Christmas traditions, and that those traditions will have a real emotional (and maybe even a spiritual) resonance. It might be a particular concert or panto that you see every year. It might be the particular menu for Christmas Day (more pigs-in-blankets and fewer sprouts). My tradition is that ever since I was a boy the family has always gone on a Boxing Day walk. I can’t quite explain why, but as soon as I take that first step on Boxing Day I’m filled with a tremendous sense of peace and joy.

Stories are the preeminent vehicles of meaning, and so it stands to reason that a ‘traditional story’ has the most power in this regard. The story of the Nativity doesn’t just give us the narrative of the birth of Christ, it gives us the psychological, emotional, and metaphorical content that the narrative carries. It’s a story, so it doesn’t seek just to tell us what happened, it seeks to makes us feel the effects of what happened. The story of the Nativity is the story of God coming into His creation. It is a story not just of a baby boy being born, but of peace and joy and hope and love and glory being born into the world – born in such a way that they can never be overcome. It is the beginning of the great love story: God so loving the world that he gave His only Son to save it.

They were moved not just because they delighted in the performance of their son or daughter, but because they were inhabiting ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’.

You can read the nativity of Matthew and Luke once, and you might miss most or even all of this emotional and spiritual weight; but read them over and over again at the same time of year every year, and you can’t help but be changed. You’ll find, over many years, that you’re not just reading or hearing the story anymore…you’re LIVING the story. If you live the story, you feel the story – the great message of Christmas (a mystery we will never truly comprehend in this life) is something that takes over you mind and your heart, and you really are living Christmas.

Most of the parents I met that morning will not darken our doors again until next year. Maybe some of them are faithful attenders of other churches, and maybe most of them aren’t. In that moment, as their children performed the same play that children up and down this country have performed for more than a century, it didn’t matter. They were moved, many beyond expectation. They were moved not just because they delighted in the performance of their son or daughter, but because they were inhabiting ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’. Many were moved because the themes of peace, hope, joy, love, harmony, wonder, worship, and delight – ideas that entrance even the most cynical mind – were presented again to them. Many were moved because the deep resonances of the Christmas tradition were stirred once again.

I love The Elves and the Shoemaker. I delight in the creativity of contemporary tellings of old stories. Any time a child finds the confidence to stand on a stage and perform, my heart rejoices. But…I would like to put in a little plea for the resurgence of the Traditional Nativity Play; its story, its themes, and its traditions are genuinely timeless, and a chance to remember the eternal beauty of hope, joy, and love is something we all need…especially at Christmas.

Article

Christmas culture

Culture

18 December 2023

4 min read

TV’s search for the perfect Christmas special

Sitcoms rely on expectation and conventions. Here's the one rule that gets broken at Christmas time.

James Cary

James Cary is a writer of situation comedy for BBC TV (Miranda, Bluestone 42) and Radio (Think the Unthinkable, Hut 33).

Dressed in camouflage uniforms and makeshift costumes, soldiers create a nativity scene

Bluestone 42 Christmas Special, 2013.

There are rules to sitcoms. I should know. I’ve been writing sitcom scripts for over twenty years. This includes two Christmas specials (Miranda and Bluestone 42). When you start writing a Christmas episode of a sitcom, you look back to Christmas specials you saw as a child. Soon, you are aware that there are certain expectations for a Christmas special. You also realise you can break one of the rules of sitcom.

Before I explain what that is, let me give you the basic rules of a TV sitcom. Essentially you need three things: Characters; conflict; and a confined space. Each episode has a beginning and a middle and end, but the characters must end up back where they started.

The characters in a sitcom are in conflict. They have contrasting viewpoints, seeing the world very differently. And they are confined, unable to walk away from each other because they are family (Think Del and Rodney in Only Fools and Horses), or they have to work together (Think Sir Humphrey and Hacker in Yes, Prime Minister) or they all live in the same suffocatingly small village (Think Geraldine and Alice in The Vicar of Dibley).

Each week, the characters have quests. They conflict. The story plays out in the same reliably predictable but surprising way. Del Boy has another get-rich-quick scheme; Sir Humphrey tries to stop Hacker from changing anything; and the Vicar of Dibley keeps trying to help Alice and the idiots who surround her. That can’t change, even in a Christmas special.

At Christmas, however, you can have your characters go on a journey. That’s quite a popular option. But the journey has to be arduous – like the journey to Bethlehem – and might involve a pregnant woman (think The Royle Family) – like the journey to Bethlehem. But your characters could go on a road trip in any episode. That’s not the rule you have to break.

Your Christmas special might be centred around your character’s own version of what constitutes ‘the perfect Christmas’. These expectations must be met, but the lesson is normally that it’s all about who you’re with, not what you do. In the Bluestone 42 Christmas special, the bomb disposal team in Afghanistan are away from home so trying to have a ‘normal’ Christmas with turkey and a nativity play in which yonder star turns out to be a mortar attack by the Taliban. But they’re in it together.

Family is always important in a sitcom, but doubly so in a Christmas episode. In Miranda Series 2, our comedy heroine wants to do Christmas her own way with her friends, and not spend the day with her embarrassing and eccentric parents. But she learns a common Christmas lesson that family comes first, home is best, and no-one does Christmas better than your own family. Again, this is not a deviation from the normal rules.

So, what rule does the Christmas episode break? It is cast iron law across all genres of television. It’s the Deus Ex Machina. That’s not normally allowed. Deus Ex Machina literally means ‘God from the machinery’. It’s a Latin term for what happens in Greek theatre. Actors representing gods would be suspended above the stage and at the denouement of the play, they would come down and intervene, so that everything is sorted out.

It’s not for a twenty-first century sitcom writer to say that the Greeks didn’t know anything about theatre, but wow. Modern audiences would not stand for this totally unjustified divine intervention. If a character was about to be exposed by the annual Church fete and at the last minute, a thunderstorm out of nowhere rained off the whole event, you would start throwing things at the TV. If a character declared undying love to another and it was not reciprocated, the sudden discovery of a foolproof love potion in the third act would have the producer, director, the cast and even the make-up lady asking for rewrites.

But at Christmas, God comes down from on high. So, in your seasonal sitcom special, you’re allowed a miracle. In fact, the audience are almost demanding a ‘Christmas miracle’. This is the time of year when magic happens.

This miracle normally happens overnight because that’s when miracles happen. The Wise Men followed the star to the witness the child born of a virgin. Given stars were involved, we presume it was night time (although the text doesn’t say so). Marley and three Christmas ghosts visit Ebeneezer Scrooge at night. He is miraculously transformed by the experience.

Christmas is a time when lots of people going to church who normally would not, but the vast majority of people in the UK do not go to church or worship God at Christmas. But the incarnation, that is story of God made flesh in Christ, keeps poking through and turning up whether we like it or not. If we won’t go to church to hear that story, God will send it through waves and wires and onto our screens in TV specials so that we all remember that Christmas isn’t just a time for family and traditions; it is a time of miracles. At Christmas, we allow ourselves the luxury of belief.