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Christmas survival

17 December 2023

9 min read

Navigating your reality of Christmas

Recounting how Christmas changed for her, Lianne Howard-Dace re-evaluates the story and experiences of the season.

Lianne Howard-Dace

Lianne Howard-Dace is a writer and trainer, with a background in church and community fundraising.

A shopping street is crowded by taxi cabs and buses while above it a Christmas illumination of an angel hangs over all.

Jamie Davies, via Unsplash.

When I became a Christian thirteen years ago, I had to figure out how I might blend the sacred and the secular and rediscover what Christmas meant to me.

Each December, millions of people celebrate this occasion, without faith or religion necessarily playing a role. Nearly 90 per cent of people in the UK celebrate Christmas each year, despite only around 46 per cent of people identifying as Christians and only 5 per cent regularly attending church. These people create memories for their children because they cherish the ones their parents created for them. They decorate their house because it feels good to break up the darkness of winter with a riot of light and colour. They gather with their loved ones because it’s great to have an excuse to catch up. They eat and drink together because there are few pleasures greater than enjoying Yorkshire puddings and roast potatoes with your nearest and dearest. These experiences may even be quite spiritual, though they won’t always be recognised as such.

Of course, the secular Christmas has taken on a mythology of its own. The image I have painted above is true, but it is not the whole picture. Whatever our beliefs, we need to be careful not to make an idol of the “perfect Christmas”. Not every family can afford to eat lavishly. Not everyone has people to celebrate with. For some, late December may mark a different anniversary altogether, and be a hard time of year. Even as someone who would readily say they love Christmas, I have had my fair share of family and romantic dramas that have made some years hard.

If all you’ve ever known each Christmas is a turkey roast and visits from Santa, how can you look beyond the gift-giving and feasting which you have previously focused on, to discover the Jesus narrative within Christmas? You do not have to discard all those other things if they bring you joy, but you will start to notice that there is more going on in the marking of this holiday than you had previously considered.

Underneath the tinsel and baubles you will find Mary and Joseph in a cattle shed, with the infant Jesus lying in a manger. Perhaps there will be animals, and visitors bearing gifts as well. And you will think that you know the story. You’ll remember your role as a shepherd in a school play and playing silent night on the recorder. You’ll remember that Christmas is all about the birth of Jesus. And Jesus is the son of God, or something like that?

An all-powerful God could have revealed themselves to the world in an infinite number of ways. They could have come as a giant, towering over everyone. They could have arrived in a fiery chariot pulled by snow-leopards. They could have come riding a robot, ready to overthrow the Romans.

If the school nativity play is your primary reference point for what Christianity has to offer your life, what does it really tell you about Jesus, and why he matters? Familiarity breeds contempt. So, many people see the nativity scene year after year and dismiss it out of hand. The son of God being born as a baby 2,000 years ago is just a fairy tale. It blends in amongst the snowmen and reindeer, as just another motif of the festive season.

The nativity has become deeply sanitised and is so far removed from our modern way of life in the Global North, that for most it can be hard to see what it is trying to tell us. And if you never enter a church or meet any Christians, who is going to show you? Even as someone who was inquisitive and interested in spiritual things, for a long time, I compartmentalised the ‘churchy’ bit of Christmas as something for other people.

In looking again at Christmas I have found that yes, it tells us a lot about Jesus. But also, it tells us so much about God the Creator. An all-powerful God could have revealed themselves to the world in an infinite number of ways. They could have come as a giant, towering over everyone. They could have arrived in a fiery chariot pulled by snow-leopards. They could have come riding a robot, ready to overthrow the Romans.

But instead, at a time when 30 per cent of infants didn’t live to see their first birthday, God comes to earth as a baby. A tiny human with a soft bit on the top of his head and blurry vision, who can’t stay awake for more than an hour or so, and needs his nappy changed every half hour. That speaks to me not of a God who is far, far away in some magical realm, or a God who wants to control and oppress us, but of a God who deeply understands and respects the human experience. Who is right in the amniotic fluid, and the blood, and the crap of life, with us.

Believing that Jesus is not just the Son of God but also, somehow, Godself at the same time, can take some serious mental gymnastics when you approach it as a cerebral exercise. But when you allow yourself to see and feel the stories afresh, and ask yourself what each of them is revealing about God, God’s relationship to us and God’s relationship to our world, it can start to make an odd kind of sense.

I remember how full my heart was when I learnt that the name you’ve maybe heard Jesus called in carols – Immanuel – actually means ‘God with us’. For me, discovering this gem hidden, tucked away beneath what I thought I knew about Christmas, was extraordinary. Because, God had been with me all along.

God was with me that first disorientating Christmas after my parents’ divorce. God was with me when I was 19 and randomly went to Midnight Mass after four gin and tonics. God was with me when the dog ate our gingerbread house, roof and all. And God was with me when I laughed at my nephew trying his first Brussels sprout.

But the incarnation – the humanity of Jesus – being so pivotal to my faith, I actually find great comfort in envisaging Jesus’ birth as messy and complicated, as the rest of us.

When I think about what it means for God to become a flesh-and-blood person, I find it can be helpful to imagine the humanity of the nativity. To add a layer of realism we don’t often see. Now, I have never given birth, but unlike many childless, or childfree, people in the West, I have witnessed a birth. With the confidence gained from having endured childbirth twice already, when my mum went into labour with my brother, she refused to go to hospital. I think her exact words to my dad were, ‘The midwife can ******* come to me’.

This happened early one June morning in 1992, and I, aged six, was awoken around 6am by my mum’s screams. Going to investigate what on earth was going on, I was surprised to find my nan open the door to my parents’ bedroom. She told me that the baby was coming, and that I should go and occupy myself by getting ready for school.

Having had the birds and the bees talk at a relatively early age, I was quite keen to get a good look at what was going on. I couldn’t see much, as there were four or five adults crammed into the modest master bedroom of our terraced house. But I could see my mum in the birthing position, I could sense the intense nature of what was happening. And, even after my nan closed the bedroom door, I could hear the noises. Few on-screen depictions of birth have come close to really capturing what happened in our house that morning, even on my beloved Grey’s Anatomy.

I went downstairs to make myself a bowl of cereal. I have no idea what my then three year-old sister was up to at this point, but it’s quite possible she slept through the whole thing. After watching some classic 90s kids’ TV (Playdays, anyone?) I went and changed into my little grey skirt, white polo shirt and navy sweatshirt to get ready for school. I then went to brush my teeth, only to be confronted by a disembodied umbilical cord in our bathroom sink. I must have made a commotion at this stage, because I remember the midwife coming to explain what this peculiar mass of blood and veins and tissue was, and suggest that I brush my teeth over the bath on this occasion.

My mum couldn’t avoid hospital completely, and she and the baby went off in an ambulance; she for stitches and he for routine checks. As they were bundled off, my nan and dad came downstairs carrying the double mattress which had just welcomed my little brother into the world. It was practically soaked through and they balanced it on top of the rotary airer in our garden to dry in the spring sunshine. Of course, I delighted in the opportunity to regale my whole class with all the graphic details of this experience when I eventually arrived at school.

It seems to me that if Jesus himself is not spared a painful, bloody death, it’s unlikely to me that Mary would be spared a painful, bloody birth. Let’s not forget that the gospels were written by men, who were likely removed from the messy women’s business of birth, and perhaps wouldn’t have seen how powerful including this might have been.

Perhaps people find it respectful to narrate the birth of Christ in a clean and painless way. If Mary is the virgin mother of Christ, or even immaculately conceived herself, then surely she would’ve been spared the birth pains which Eve inflicted on her sisters? But the incarnation – the humanity of Jesus – being so pivotal to my faith, I actually find great comfort in envisaging Jesus’ birth as messy and complicated, as the rest of us. Perhaps Mary had terrible morning sickness throughout her pregnancy like my sister, perhaps Jesus was born earlier than expected like my cousin, perhaps he had the cord round his neck like me.

We can take what is good and true and life-giving from wherever we find it during the Christmas period.

It would be easy to end this article by saying that once you become a Christian and you know what Christmas is really all about, you should become worried about it being secularised and not taken seriously. You should drastically change your own behaviours and practices around Christmas. But this would miss the fact that God was already with us all along, even if we didn’t realise it.

For those of us with a foot in both camps of the sacred and secular Christmas, the journey doesn’t end when we find faith. There are certainly things we’ll want to re-evaluate - the rampant commercialism of Christmas for one thing - but we don’t need to throw the baby out with the bath water. Having unpicked what we thought we knew about the Christian Christmas, we can rebuild, reconnect and redefine what Christmas means to us now. We can create our own traditions and work out how to interweave them with those of our friends and family who may not share our faith.

I’ve never actually been to church on Christmas morning, because there are traditions in my family that I do not want to miss. The croissants and jam we eat for breakfast in our PJs every Christmas morning are a sign of God’s abundance. I will find a lull in the day, when others are snoozing or watching TV, to pray a prayer of gratitude for them. I will have spent the month leading up-to Christmas attending services and events to help me reflect on and anticipate the coming celebration of Christ’s birth. I’ll also have eaten a chocolate every day to help me count down to the day itself. And after we’ve had our Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve (very Scandinavian, I know), I will go to Midnight Mass. That is the moment when it works for me to really immerse myself in the faith aspects of Christmas.

We can take what is good and true and life-giving from wherever we find it during the Christmas period. We can celebrate loved ones reuniting, and that the days will soon become longer, not in spite of what we now know about God and Jesus, but because of it – because of the richness and new dimensions it adds to our lives. When we know that everything is a gift from God, it makes the presents our friends and family have chosen for us all the more significant, not less.

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Wildness

7 November 2024

7 min read

It’s getting harder to be wild in this world

We’ve trapped and tamed wilderness into a commodity.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Against a night sky a lit up face is blurred by the camera movement.

Under a Dartmoor night sky.

Yousef Salhamoud on Unsplash.

Some while back, my husband rearranged the books in our house, making sure that they were grouped together by theme. We have a lot of books, and there are now themes and sub-themes. It was quite an operation. Within the nature-related books, he created a separate shelf for books that have ‘wild’ in the title. We joked about it, but it made me think about how I’d noticed ideas of ‘wild’ pop up in lots of places in recent years: on clothing and stationery (with leaves or words like ‘keep growing’ printed), in shop windows (furniture displays draped in plastic greenery and fake animal skins), on social media (there are accounts that have ‘wild’ in the title connected to farming, conservation, publishing, personal development, coaching, poetry, business, and more), and in book shops (of which we apparently have only half the stock).

A quick online search on the topic of wilderness quickly leads me to conservation initiatives and statistics on the state of nature, but it also leads me to nature connection experiences, wild swimming, wild camping, soul work, and more. Wilderness becomes a pliable and hard-to-define term. It can relate to the natural world, to wildlife and natural spaces that have avoided human domination. It can also relate to the inner world, to spiritual experiences or to isolating and challenging times. But however you approach it, wilderness – inner, outer – seems to be having a hard time.

In recent months, wild camping has come under the spotlight. Dartmoor is the only place in England where wild camping is legal, and this this access helped to form me: as a teenager I hiked and camped with friends, encountered Dartmoor ponies trying to steal our food in the night, stomped through bogs and wolfed down boil-in-the-bag meals as the sun set. As an adult I’ve camped alone in a bivvy bag, my soul singing back to the Milky Way shining above me. Now, these experiences feel as much in need of protection as the nature they depend on, since a wealthy landowner decided to try and prevent people from undertaking this ancient practice of sleeping under the stars. The court case is ongoing, but it has highlighted the fragility of our access to nature here in England. Just 8 per cent of English countryside is accessible, and 3 per cent of rivers have an uncontested right to swim. Now, the last remaining right to sleep under the stars is under threat.

It is hard to know what we’re losing when it becomes harder and harder to see and touch the real thing.

We live in a time of crisis not just of the state of nature, but also of how we experience the natural world. In a recent study of nature connectedness, Britain was ranked lowest of all the countries surveyed. Our biodiversity is in crisis and so is our ability to encounter the natural world. This feels heightened by a way of being in the western world that sees us all living in our individual houses, working hard to pay for them, shuttling children and selves through schedules, spending fewer and fewer hours outside and with each other.

And this is not just a problem ‘out there’, because inner and outer landscapes are linked. It is unsurprising to me that in the UK at least, levels of good mental health, biodiversity, and access to nature have all been in decline. Disintegration of one is, I think, deeply connected to disintegration of the other.

These linked crises feel further threatened by the trapping and taming of ideas of wilderness, wrapping it into trends and materialism, commodifying it. There are some brilliant and essential initiatives helping to re-wild our inner and outer worlds. But there are also offerings that use wilderness imagery and the freedom and adventure associated with it to sell products and services, or as backdrop to human endeavour, or as a destination or resource for our consumption. I think a commodified wild can get in the way of the actual wilderness we need both externally and internally. This commodification is, I think, affecting our understanding of what the wild is and why it matters. It is hard to know what we’re losing when it becomes harder and harder to see and touch the real thing.

If real wilderness is everywhere but where we need it right now, how might we re-find it – in the natural world, but also within ourselves and our communities? Answering that question is work that many people are focused on now in all kinds of ways, and a short essay cannot begin to offer a full response. I will write more on this topic. But the question I have in mind at the moment is, how do we invoke wildness and wonder in the landscape of the modern world? – a physical landscape that is being stripped of nature, but also a social landscape that can often diminish our humanity. Perhaps a simpler way to ask the same question is, how do we not just survive life but get excited about it? – How do we love ourselves, our neighbours, and creation enough to deeply and truly care for these things?

Time stops, something says: here, look at this, it is everything.

There are of course structures, systems, and powers that need to change so that people can move out of mere survival, and so that the wild world is restored. I am not exploring those things here. Here, I want to simply share three things that lately, have energised my ability to feel the love, the excitement, and the desire to cherish and protect our hearts, our relationships, and the generous world that hosts us all. Perhaps by reawakening these things, we might find motivation and sustenance for tackling structures and systems.

First, I have been noticing what my young daughter notices. The light shining off a puddle; the way an ant crawls on her hand; the bright silver moon in the sky. I have never struggled to access the exhilaration of the natural world, but seeing through her eyes, I am doing so again. Time stops, something says: here, look at this, it is everything. The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich saw the wonder of the world, and God’s love for it, in a single hazelnut. She recounts her visions in her book Revelations of Divine Love. Sometimes connecting with the specific can help us see and face the global.

Second, there are authors who help me summon wildness and wonder in the landscape of the modern world, and in a future Seen & Unseen piece I’ll take us on a tour of some of those I love the most. Some of the authors are ancient. In Psalm 78, I read “…they forgot what he had done, the wonders he had shown them”, and “…they kept on sinning; in spite of his wonders, they did not believe.” If sin is a kind of disconnection, perhaps our disconnection from creation might lead our gaze to turn inward, and to land on things that do not call forth the best of humanity, rather than the wonder of each other and the world around us. That we are able to forget wonder is something we must remember and work to counter.

Third, I have been thinking through the encounters that have most exposed me to wilderness of the world and of my soul and of relationship – both the uplifting and the challenging. Encountering the vastness of that shining and vertigo-inducing Dartmoor night sky; encountering others in relationships that have helped me slip my skin and enter their unknowability and fragility and beauty; encountering contexts that seem too broken for repair and yet still light enters in. It is in these encounters that I first found God dwelling, and when I followed his trail, I noticed that throughout the Bible there are many people who experience the challenges, joy, and lessons of the wilderness. Wilderness is not just beauty – it can also be unknowable, disorienting, scary. For 40 days in the wilderness, but also in the beauty of the lily of the field and birds of the air, Jesus is right there with us, showing that God can meet us in beauty and barrenness, in wonder and in despair. Again and again in the Bible I see how God loves the world, how he calls it constantly to life through resurrection, through re-creation, through that three-in-oneness of father/son/holy spirit, of self/other/world, of body/encounter/mystery.

Now, I think our souls and societies might benefit from investing in relationships first conjured in Eden: with a garden, with a human, with God and the mystery he points us to. These things feed each other; when one suffers so do the others. As we face a disintegrating and increasingly commodified natural world, a mental health crisis, and an epidemic of loneliness, I think we are being called back to that garden, and to the kinds of wildness it made possible. I’ll look forward to exploring these themes more.