Why a cultural Christmas sometimes struggles to celebrate

In the build-up to Christmas there's contrasting rhythms of ancient and modern ways to celebrate.

Alistair Reid

Alistair Reid is studying theology at Oxford University as part of training for Church of England ministry.

Looking down a red shiny christmas tree in the centre of a department store gallery.

Christmas at Galeries Lafayette department store, Paris.

Bing Hao on Unsplash.

Our lives dance to the rhythm of anticipation and fulfilment. The food in our fridge, the concert in our calendar, the holiday on the horizon. From daily pleasures to longer-term goals, we inhabit the familiar routine of journeying and arriving.

The build-up to Christmas offers such a rhythm on a much wider scale, moving beyond the personal to a culture-wide experience. We receive our early warning alert in September as the mince pies hit the supermarkets. But by November preparations are in full swing. Retailer John Lewis has coined ‘the 45 days of Christmas.’ Their biggest day of sales for Christmas decorations is on November 10th. By December, the Christmas ads, Christmas lights and Christmas music become relentless. We make plans, buy presents, prepare food in a bid to deliver the promised Christmas cheer. And, finally, the big day comes – with turkey and trimmings. The length, breadth and depth of anticipation channeled into a single day.

And then it’s Boxing Day.

Boxing Day can have its own pleasures, but there’s also a sense of nostalgia, and even sadness. The wrapping paper left scrumpled on the floor from the night before, the leftovers in the fridge, the home emptied of guests, whether welcome or not. At best, we have the sad realization that the next Christmas is as far away as it could possibly be. But more likely, the realization that it wasn’t quite as good as we’d hoped, anyway. As Sylvia Plath memorably wrote in The Bell Jar:

“I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.”

And so the cycle goes on. At least there’s New Year’s Eve to look forward to. Or Easter, as the supermarkets swap mince pies for hot cross buns.

Our cultural Christmas struggles to wait. The joys of Christmas extend ever earlier, with searches for Christmas trees surging from immediately after the summer holidays.

Our modern Christmas rhythm is, in many ways, parasitic upon an ancient Christian one. In Christian tradition, the four weeks building up to Christmas is known as Advent. The word means ‘coming,’ for Advent is a period of expectant waiting both for the birth of Christ at Christmas, and also the hope that Jesus will return to put all things right. As such, it is a time of preparation, self-examination and fasting, as Christians ready themselves to stand before the judgement seat of God. Advent is followed by Christmas, celebrated for twelve whole days (as in the famous carol), which is why Christmas decorations went up on Christmas Eve, and came down on January 6th, twelfth night.

In many ways, the ancient pattern is similar to the modern pattern. Both are liturgical rhythms that mark and measure our years, as we inhabit cultural, familial and personal routines. Both involve anticipation and fulfilment, build-up and joy.

And yet the differences are also stark. Our cultural Christmas struggles to wait. The joys of Christmas extend ever earlier, with searches for Christmas trees surging from immediately after the summer holidays. But, more surprisingly, our cultural Christmas struggles to celebrate. That might seem strange given the quantity of food, wrapping paper and presents that we get through. But rather than twelve days of Christmas, we barely make it through one.

By contrast, the Christian tradition emphasizes the discipline of waiting. But not as an ascetic end in itself, as if joy is bad. Rather, the denial of waiting is replaced by the sustained joy of celebration. Twelve days of Christmas celebration is almost impossible for us to imagine – wouldn’t we get bored? Given our longing for joy, it’s somewhat surprising just how hard it is to sustain.

More deeply, these two contrasting Christmases place their weight in very different places. Our modern Christmas expects Christmas to deliver what we’re looking for: through friends, family, food and fun. But while we catch glimpses of joy, we’re often disappointed: the turkey is overcooked, the presents are not what we wanted, the kids are bickering. It’s no wonder that sometimes Christmas can struggle to bear the weight put upon it. It’s no wonder that Christmas Day can descend into disappointment, self-pity, even acrimony.

But the ancient Advent-Christmas rhythm, while incorporating these joys, deliberately seeks to place them within a larger story. The baby born at Christmas brings salvation from sin and death, turning Advent meditation on our future judgement from fearful cowering into confident expectation and present joy. This is hope and joy that does not depend on the perfect lunch, or the most sparkling of conversation. Instead, the greatest gift of Christmas is, well, Christ. And he can generate twelve days of celebration. In fact, he can generate joy for eternity. Rightly, C.S. Lewis described joy as ‘the serious business of heaven.’

This is not to condemn our cultural Christmas. Who wouldn’t enjoy a cheeky mince pie in October? But what if it isn’t capable of delivering what we all want? Perhaps our capacity for joy is larger – and rooted deeper – than we thought. In this world of disappointment, sadness and suffering, perhaps the route to such sustained joy is through rhythming our lives to a larger story.

Explainer

Aliens

Christmas culture

Creed

29 December 2023

5 min read

Star of wonder and beyond

From the Christmas star, humankind has been fascinated by astronomical possibilities.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

Tarantula Nebula, by the James Webb Space Telescope.

NASA, via Wikimedia Commons.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Christmas Day 2021. After hair-raising maneuvers to unfurl its tennis-court-sized mirrors, it has been sending back breathtaking images of the cosmos since July of last year.

Christmas was a good day for the launch, given its astronomical connections. ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven’, the angels sang to the shepherds, ‘and peace to his people on Earth.’ Meanwhile, the wise men were above all diligent observers of the heavens. ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?’, they ask, ‘For we observed his start at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’

Quite what that ‘star’ might mean there is open to debate. Comets have been popular with artists. Giotto painted one, for instance, in his Adoration of the Magi in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. It is almost certainly Halley’s Comet, which had appeared just a few years before, in October 1301. But why would anything in the heavens be interpreted as a birth in Judea? It would probably involve something in a constellation associated with the nation of the Hebrews. Pisces seems to be favoured, for some reason. A nova of some kind is one possibility: what would look like a temporary new star because, in fact, a previously invisible star was undergoing a spectacular death. Chinese records suggest a nova in 5 BC, which fits the likely date for for Christ’s birth of 7–2 BC.

The problem with both comets and novae is that they were more likely seen as harbingers of doom than good news. The better candidate for suggesting something joyful is a planetary conjunction, and there would have been a rather spectacular conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars at the right time. None of that, admittedly, explains what it means for the star then to have led the wise men. Coming up against that challenge, we might think that looking into the astronomical detail is the wrong way to approach the story. Nonetheless, Matthew had something in mind when he wrote about a start in his gospel, and it’s worthwhile to ask what that might have been.

It might be fitting for God to deal with other species as intimately as God has dealt with us, so that they might see ‘God made visible’ in their own nature, as we see God made visible in ours.

More recently, the Christmas story has intersected with astronomy in questions about how to think about Christian theology now that we are aware quite how big the universe is, especially if it may contain a great deal of other life. We don’t know whether that’s true, of course, but given we now know that planets common around stars, and there are billions of billions of stars in the universe, the probabilities seem to tilt towards other life, at least as I see it.

Suggestions surfaces from time to time that the world’s religions have arrived late to the party, when it comes to thinking about life beyond Earth. The astronomer and broadcaster Carl Sagan made that claim, for instance, in his best-selling book Pale Blue Dot. In fact, the earliest discussions of life beyond Earth I know about from Christian writers come from the mid-fifteenth century (and they stretch even further back in Judaism and Islam, to give two other examples). Christian writers have written on the subject ever since. If few gave us more than a paragraph here or a page there, that’s usually because the prospect of other life did not worry them enough to warrant more. They noted the prospect cheerfully, and moved on.

Until the twentieth century, the prospect of parallel Nativities on other planets was rarely in view. In a sense, it didn’t need to be. It’s a consistent Christian position to say that God joined his life to all creation in joining it to one species of rational animal on Earth, just as God joined his life to all humanity in being born in a stable, in a wayside town, in a backwater province of the Roman Empire.

One erudite early exploration of multiple Incarnations comes in a poem from the 1920s by the Roman Catholic poet Alice Meynell, entitled ‘Christ in the Universe’. More recently, Meynell’s topic has become perhaps the central theme in thinking theologically about life beyond Earth. My own book (Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine, 2023) looks at the prospect of life beyond Earth from the perspective of all of central topics in Christian doctrine (creation, sin, redemption, revelation, the Trinity, and so on), but the largest section is on Christmas and possible parallels. I am sympathetic to the idea that God would also unite himself to another natures, alongside the human nature he took up in Christ: not because I think that would be necessary, but because it might be fitting. It might be fitting for God to deal with other species as intimately as God has dealt with us, so that they might see ‘God made visible’ in their own nature, as we see God made visible in ours.

Hiding in plain sight in the Nativity stories is another key to Christian thinking about life beyond, namely the angels. It’s not that I think that angels are aliens, or that alien life is angelic. In fact, being a disciple of St Thomas Aquinas, I’m inclined to view angels as entirely immaterial, and so very much not examples of biological life. But angels are useful for thinking about other biological life beyond Earth nonetheless, because of what they mean for the Christian imagination. The angels show that there’s always been space in that imagination for rational creatures other than human beings. They show that Christianity has never imagined that we’re the sole object of God’s love, or even the most glorious of species.

The Christmas story has its cosmic elements: the star, glory in the highest heavens, and the angels, reminding us that wonderful though humanity is, it has no monopoly on rational life. My hunch, as much as my hunch matters, is that if there is other life then they too may see God face-to-face in their own Incarnation. Even if we find evidence of life beyond Earth, however, it’s not going give us much detail. The balance of gases in the atmosphere of a planet around another star might indicate life, but not much else about it. The prospects for interplanetary comparative religion are far off indeed. Alice Meynell had the right idea, when she recognised that one of the joys of the life of the world to come will be learning the stories of God’s dealings elsewhere:

But in the eternities,

Doubtless we shall compare together, hear

A million alien Gospels, in what guise

He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

O, be prepared, my soul!

To read the inconceivable, to scan

The myriad forms of God those stars unroll

When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

Alice Meynell