Article
Comment
Christmas survival
5 min read

How to ruin Christmas

Actor turned vicar Natalie Garrett, recounts the perils of being a Christmas Pro.

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

A nativity seen with wooden figures and hay, amidst which a cat sits in the manger.
Nativity cat, Warsaw, 2012.
Kacper Pempel.

So, during the years of my acting career, I always avoided Panto (oh yes I did). Not because I don’t like Panto, I love a good Panto. But because I didn’t want to work over Christmas. How God will have chortled at that great irony, knowing as he did that as of 2005 (the year I got ordained), I would be working every Christmas for the rest of time. 

Christmas is different now. Not only am I ordained, I’m married to a vicar. I’m completely immersed in professional Christmas. And Christmas is a bit different when you’ve turned pro. I won’t go so far as to say that being ordained has ruined Christmas, but it’s certainly changed it. But so has (supposedly) being a grown up.  

My “Proper Christmas” will always be the Christmas that I grew up with (is that just me?). I had traditional preparing-for-Christmas jobs that I did every year on Christmas Eve eve: polishing the special cutlery we only used once a year, making the brandy butter (which is a bit odd now I think about it, being that heavily involved with brandy from the age of six) and decorating The Tree. And having the annual argument with my sister about whose turn it was to take the present to our neighbours across the road. And eating a lot of satsumas. And chocolate. And seeing my cousins and playing Trivial Pursuit. All of which looks very rosy seen through the eyes of a child. Christmas is different when you’re ordained and you have to work, but it’s also very different when you’re the grown up. 

I used to think my mother made a ridiculous amount of fuss about Christmas. I am now that same mother. I think it’s Michael McIntyre who does a whole routine about women starting to write their Christmas To Do lists in October and endlessly shrieking, “there’s so much to do!” That’s me folks. Christmas as a grown up – or at least for this grown up – feels like there’s so much to do! 

I always imagine (unhelpfully fantasize) that Other People’s families are living the Christmas dream – the relaxed, cosy evenings drinking hot chocolate or eggnog in front of a roaring fire; laughing and playing wholesome games happily and peacefully with their angelic children, wearing matching Christmas jumpers. In the cold light of day, I realise that, actually, most people find Christmas stressful for a million different reasons. It’s not all twinkly and bright. 

For many people, Christmas means seeing all the family that they avoid during the rest of the year. It means spending money they can ill-afford on presents that may not be wanted. Christmas means missing the people who aren’t with us anymore. It means endless advertising campaigns suggesting that you aren’t living the perfect life – but that if you buy a new sofa, you’ll salvage the ruins of your life just in time for a perfect, twinkly Christmas. 

And so the life of the mythical twinkly, “magical” Christmas lives on. With little or no reference to its origin story. 

I was the chaplain at a Church of England secondary comprehensive school for seven years. In my first term, putting together the carol service, I asked a class chapel rep if she would do one of the Bible readings. “Oh, is Christmas in the Bible?” Huh. Another conversation I had went along the lines of, “Miss, I don’t believe in Jesus and all that religious stuff. But I believe in the spirit of Christmas.” Huh. 

There’s a song in the staged musical version of the film Nativity, which is to all intents and purposes a Christmas prayer. But instead of the prayer being directed at God, it is directed at Father Christmas; 

Dear Father Christmas, make our wish come true 

Dear Father Christmas send your spirit through 

There are Children in the world who need you way more than we do 

But Father Christmas, we still believe in you 

Dear Father Christmas make our wish come true 

Which brings me to a difficult moment in my Christmassy life. I have a parenting policy that demands that I tell my children the truth. Whatever the question, if I know the answer, I will give it to them honestly. So, when my children were around the ages of four and six, in the middle of Sainsbury’s, with both children piled into the trolley, in mid-November, surrounded by early Christmas-abilia, one of my children asked me, “Mummy, does Father Christmas really exist?”. (SPOILER ALERT!!). I had to give an honest answer. If the question had been less straight, if there had been any wriggle room at all, I would have fudged it. But a straight question deserved a straight answer. Which, wide-eyed, they went and shared with their friends. A crowd of angry parents from their Primary school came to church to complain that the Vicar’s children had ruined Christmas. 

But my point was that if I were to tell my children that I believe Father Christmas exists and that he grants Christmas wishes, were they ever to find out that I had lied (ahem), how would they trust me when I say that I believe Jesus does exist and that he does answer prayers? The challenge has lived with me ever since: how to keep Christmas rooted in Christ without ruining the Christmas magic. 

Well, my saving grace is that I’m still a sucker for a bit of Christmas schmaltz. The theologically sensitive part of me absolutely abhors Away in a Manger (“no crying he makes”? Really? He was a new-born baby, of course he cried!!) and Little Donkey (in the Bible accounts there is absolutely no mention of donkeys at all. Not a single one – not on the road, not in the stable. No cows, no donkeys.) But light some candles, get the children singing and I have tears pouring down my face with the best of them, loving every moment.  

But that still doesn’t mean that the essence of Christmas is the twinkly magic. Because, of course, the first Christmas was neither twinkly nor magic. Nor did it involve a perfectly curated tablescape (which I also love at Christmas). It didn’t involve any the stereotypical Christmassy things that we all get stressed about and love in equal measure. The first Christmas was messy and difficult. But it was also the most real, most genuinely joyous event in human history. Apart from Easter. Don’t get me started on chocolate bunnies….

Article
Assisted dying
Care
Comment
Politics
6 min read

Assisted dying’s problems are unsolvable

There’s hollow rhetoric on keeping people safe from coercion.
Members of a parliamentary committee sit at a curving table, in front of which a video screen shows other participants.
A parliamentary committee scrutinises the bill.
Parliament TV.

One in five people given six months to live by an NHS doctor are still alive three years later, data from the Department of Work and Pensions shows. This is good news for these individuals, and bad news for ‘assisted dying’ campaigners. Two ‘assisted dying’ Bills are being considered by UK Parliamentarians at present, one at Westminster and the other at the Scottish Parliament. And both rely on accurate prognosis as a ‘safeguard’ - they seek to cover people with terminal illnesses who are not expected to recover. 

An obvious problem with this approach is the fact, evidenced above, that doctors cannot be sure how a patient’s condition is going to develop. Doctors try their best to gauge how much time a person has left, but they often get prognosis wrong. People can go on to live months and even years longer than estimated. They can even make a complete recovery. This happened to a man I knew who was diagnosed with terminal cancer and told he had six months left but went on to live a further twelve years. Prognosis is far from an exact science. 

All of this raises the disturbing thought that if the UK ‘assisted dying’ Bills become law, people will inevitably end their lives due to well-meaning but incorrect advice from doctors. Patients who believe their condition is going to deteriorate rapidly — that they may soon face very difficult experiences — will choose suicide with the help of a doctor, when in fact they would have gone on to a very different season of life. Perhaps years of invaluable time with loved ones, new births and marriages in their families, and restored relationships. 

Accurate prognosis is far from the only problem inherent to ‘assisted dying’, however, as critics of this practice made clear at the – now concluded – oral evidence sessions held by committees scrutinising UK Bills. Proponents of Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill and Liam McArthur’s Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill have claimed that their proposals will usher in ‘safe’ laws, but statements by experts show this rhetoric to be hollow. These Bills, like others before them, are beset by unsolvable problems. 

Coercion 

Take, for example, the issue of coercion. People who understand coercive control know that it is an insidious crime that’s hard to detect. Consequently, there are few prosecutions. Doctors are not trained to identify foul play and even if they were, these busy professionals with dozens if not hundreds of patients could hardly be counted on to spot every case. People would fall through the cracks. The CEO of Hourglass, a charity that works to prevent the abuse of older people, told MPs on the committee overseeing Kim Leadbeater’s Bill that "coercion is underplayed significantly" in cases, and stressed that it takes place behind closed doors. 

There is also nothing in either UK Bill that would rule out people acting on internal pressure to opt for assisted death. In evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s Health, Social Care and Sport Committee last month, Dr Gordon MacDonald, CEO of Care Not Killing, said: “You also have to consider the autonomy of other people who might feel pressured into assisted dying or feel burdensome. Having the option available would add to that burden and pressure.” 

What legal clause could possibly remove this threat? Some people would feel an obligation to ‘make way’ in order to avoid inheritance money being spent on personal care. Some would die due to the emotional strain they feel they are putting on their loved ones. Should our society really legislate for this situation? As campaigners have noted, it is likely that a ‘right to die’ will be seen as a ‘duty to die’ by some. Paving the way for this would surely be a moral failure. 

Inequality 

Even parliamentarians who support assisted suicide in principle ought to recognise that people will not approach the option of an ‘assisted death’ on an equal footing. This is another unsolvable problem. A middle-class citizen who has a strong family support network and enough savings to pay for care may view assisted death as needless, or a ‘last resort’. A person grappling with poverty, social isolation, and insufficient healthcare or disability support would approach it very differently. This person’s ‘choice’ would be by a dearth of support. 

As Disability Studies Scholar Dr Miro Griffiths told the Scottish Parliament committee last month, “many communities facing injustice will be presented with this as a choice, but it will seem like a path they have to go down due to the inequalities they face”. Assisted suicide will compound existing disparities in the worst way: people will remove themselves from society after losing hope that society will remove the inequalities they face. 

Politicians should also assess the claim that assisted deaths are “compassionate”. The rhetoric of campaigners vying for a change in the law have led many to believe that it is a “good death” — a “gentle goodnight”, compared to the agony of a prolonged natural death from terminal illness. However, senior palliative medics underline the fact that assisted deaths are accompanied by distressing complications. They can also take wildly different amounts of time: one hour; several hours; even days. Many people would not consider a prolonged death by drug overdose as anguished family members watch on to be compassionate. 

Suicide prevention 

 It is very important to consider the moral danger involved with changing our societal approach to suicide. Assisted suicide violates the fundamental principle behind suicide prevention — that every life is inherently valuable, equal in value, and deserving of protection. It creates a two-tier society where some lives are seen as not worth living, and the value of human life is seen as merely extrinsic and conditional. This approach offers a much lower view of human dignity than the one we have ascribed to historically, which has benefited our society so much.  

Professor Allan House, a psychiatrist who appeared before the Westminster Committee that’s considering Kim Leadbeater’s Bill, described the danger of taking this step well: “We’d have to change our national suicide prevention strategy, because at the moment it includes identifying suicidal thoughts in people with severe physical illness as something that merits intervention – and that intervention is not an intervention to help people proceed to suicide.” 

 Professor House expressed concern that this would “change both the medical and societal approach to suicide prevention in general”, adding: “There is no evidence that introducing this sort of legislation reduces what we might call ‘unassisted suicide’.” He also noted that in the last ten years in the State of Oregon – a jurisdiction often held up as a model by ‘assisted dying’ campaigners – “the number of people going through the assisted dying programme has gone up five hundred percent, and the number of suicides have gone up twenty per cent”. 

The evidence of various experts demonstrates that problems associated with assisted suicide are unsolvable. And this practice does not provide a true recognition of human dignity. Instead of changing the law, UK politicians must double down on existing, life-affirming responses to the suffering that accompanies serious illness. The progress we have made in areas like palliative medicine, and the talent and technology available to us in 2025, makes another path forwards available to leaders if they choose to take it. I pray they will. 

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