How to ruin Christmas

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

Natalie Garrett

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….

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Gaza

Middle East

1 October 2024

5 min read

The human cost of the Israel-Gaza war

A veteran volunteer surgeon laments a well lived life.

Tim Goodacre

Tim Goodacre is a reconstructive plastic surgeon, and volunteer at a hospital in Gaza.

AbdulRahman at work.

Tim Goodacre.

The Israel-Gaza war rages on. Every few days a new tragedy hits our dulled senses. The West Bank and now Lebanon are getting dragged into the conflict. Palestinians and hostages continue to die, and hunger and disease threaten Gaza's displaced people as autumn and winter approach.

Yet what is often lost is the human face of this conflict. This is the story of one such life.

AbdulRahman was an intelligent, gentle and diligent young third year medical student in his early twenties, with judgement well beyond his peers. Towards the end of 2023, as the war spread more viciously towards southern Gaza, he was one a group of around 10 students who volunteered to join the team of health care workers at the European Gaza Hospital (EGH). I was volunteering there as a reconstructive plastic surgeon and and met him in the hospital.

Both medical schools in Gaza before the war began were in the north alongside their parent universities. They had been destroyed during the onslaught in the early months of fighting. In the southern town of Khan Younis, the EGH was the sole surviving operational facility to which the wounded could be transferred. It was overwhelmed by the vast numbers of families also taking refuge in what was deemed a safer space than most of the surrounding war zone.

Many of the senior medical staff and surgeons had retreated to scattered parts of the strip, displaced frequently by the ever-moving conflict and driven by the need to support their families and stay together. ‘Live together-die together’ is an understandable feature in the horror show of war. Students, frequently left with no money or resources, started to volunteer to serve in hospitals in exchange for a little food and a sense of worth in the work they could offer. Any functioning hospital, if briefly ‘deconflicted’ so they could provide relatively safe care, found itself staffed by a disparate crew of local staff, displaced students, and an indeterminate number of more senior surgeons from both Gaza and humanitarian agencies.

His desire to learn all that could be learnt, and to try to become the best surgeon possible, was palpable.

It was into this chaotic mix that young AbdulRahman walked having fled his family home in the east of Khan Younis in November 2023. A bright young man, with great aspirations to qualify as a surgeon and serve his community, he had spent the first six weeks of the war at home, unable to attend his medical school in Gaza City to the north, but working hard at his studies regardless, using every online and library resource available to him.

At some point in late November, the battle zone moved south, and his family home was shelled along with many dwellings in the vicinity. Caught in crossfire, he sheltered in his neighbouring relative’s house after his parents and other close family had escaped to Rafah.

Abdulrahman told me the dramatic story of his escape into the house in which he survived for a week alongside his relative’s family when I spoke to him in late January 2024. This young man not only survived an ordeal of indescribable fear and potential slaughter, but he was then arrested and interrogated in brutal fashion by IDF forces.

On his release after a harrowing week, he made his way barefoot to the nearest hospital, which happened to be the EGH. In that place of safety, he was given food and water and after recuperation, volunteered to work alongside a reconstructive plastic and burns surgeon who had recently returned to Gaza after training in the UK.

Although his family were still all alive in Rafah in displaced makeshift shelters, he opted to stay and throw his weight into whatever he could do to support the hospital whilst continuing to learn his profession as a doctor. Travelling occasionally at great personal risk to see and support his family, he devoted all his waking hours to surgical work in EGH operating theatres and wards. His excellent command of English made him immensely valuable to any visiting surgeons who managed to access Gaza during the war months. He was always cheerful, always willing to respond to requests for his time, however stressful the surrounding clamour from desperate patients and relatives might become.

When his working day was done, in the middle of the night he would arrange for his fellow students to have informal teaching seminars from whoever he could cajole to deliver them, and would absorb knowledge and ideas about best practice like a sponge. His desire to learn all that could be learnt, and to try to become the best surgeon possible, was palpable.

I had every intention of supporting this fine young man in achieving his professional aspirations by whatever means I could once a ceasefire arose and he could be brought safely to Europe to continue his training.

In the last week of August, AbdulRahman was sheltering in a relative’s house in Khan Younis. In the small hours of the morning an Israeli attack was launched on the neighbourhood and the house took a direct hit. AbdulRahman was killed instantly.

He knew, as does every Gazan in these troubled times, that nowhere was safe, and all lives in that tragic zone are at risk. His is a story of a life tragically cut short, of the randomness and destructiveness of war. His death strikes right at the heart of my hopes for the remnant of the fine young population of such a desperately sad nation state. He, and those like him, could have been at the heart of the re-building of Gaza, able to live in what now feels a far-off peace. I cannot translate this into anger, as AbdulRahman himself had a passionate concern for peace and reconciliation, and never once spoke to me in many conversations of support for Hamas, or of hatred for those who had destroyed his country.

What can be done however, is to honour his life and commitment with similar tenacity in supporting the pursuit of peace, justice for his people, learning and education for the remnant of the nation, and reconstruction of a Palestine that can proudly and honourably reflect the finest values it possesses. AbdulRahman was a great Palestinian, and his all too short life was one which I want to celebrate as one of the finest I have seen in many students of the next generation of doctors. May he rest in peace, and may a lasting peace come quickly to Gaza, to all of Palestine and the whole of the Middle East.