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.

Article

Christmas culture

Creed

18 December 2023

4 min read

For the knowing of the how: creating at Christmas

Learning a new craft unfolds the layers of meaning Christmas is clothed in.

Andrew Davison

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

A white crocheted angel decoration against a dark background.

Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash.

Childhood Christmas was for me a time of craft and productivity, of baking and decorating, of paper chains and printing cards with dissected potatoes. Christmas was all about making, so homemade presents outshone everything else.

That was fine if you were a painter, knitter, sculptor, seamstress, or woodworker, and each member of my family was at least one of those things. I was the odd one out: at least until the autumn before last, when I took up crochet.

My inspiration came from John Milbank: theologian, philosopher, political theorist, poet, and general ruffler of feathers. Not, I have to say, because he sets example with hook and yarn. Rather, he’d written an essay, an essay that spoke to me, as someone often in art galleries but rarely making. We get so invested in fine art, he wrote, that we forget the priority of applied art, of craft and decoration. That’s the foundation. The art we go to see in museums is great only if it succeeds in ‘intensifying this art which is proper to humanity as such.’ So, I took up crochet.

Crochet, as I hoped, is rather like playing the recorder. It’s not too difficult, even at the beginning, but has plenty of scope for complexity and skill. I’m now three blankets in, plus six cushion covers and a hat. Even my first efforts were gratefully received as presents, and I some of my recent work is much more intricate, and not half bad.

I’ve finally joined the ‘Christmas is about making’ project: and Christmas really is about making. John Donne put it like this, addressing the Virgin Mary:

… yea thou art now
Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother;
Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room,
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.

Mary becomes her ‘Maker’s maker’. In a further twist, which Donne would appreciate, Mary’s child grew up to be a carpenter, or – as the Greek would better be translated – an all-round, general purpose village maker: from hearths to homes, from shelves to structures.

In thinking about how God took up a human life, writers have often turned to the language of making. In the same poem, Donne has God weaving himself a kind of garment in Mary’s womb: ‘He will wear, / Taken from thence, flesh’. Thomas Pestel (1586–1667) opens an unjustly forgotten Christmas hymn like this:

Behold, the great Creator makes
Himself a house of clay,
a robe of virgin flesh He takes
which He will wear for aye.

More familiar still is Charles Wesley’s ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, with its lines:

‘Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, / Hail the incarnate Deity!’

The language of wearing, of robes and veils, hasn’t always fared well among theologians. I heard of one stern tutor in doctrine who would look round the chapel whenever Wesley’s carol was sung, reserving a stern word for any student who failed to fall silent at that line. He didn’t like the implication that God was merely draped in humanity, making only an outward show of being human.

Thomas Aquinas saw that worry, writing in the thirteenth century, but argued for charity. The language of clothing isn’t perfect, but we shouldn’t expect it to be. Illustrations gesture towards the truth, they aren’t identical with it, and all the more when we’re talking about God. As long as we don’t think expect the clothing image to say all that needs to be said, there’s mileage to it. For one thing, clothing can make someone visible (as the late Queen knew very well): ‘veiled in flesh, the Godhead see’. Moreover, Christ’s humanity was shaped by his divinity, like a garment is shaped by the body of the one who wears it, yet the body remains unchanged (and so does the garment), just as God became human without becoming any less divine.

Alongside clothing, Pestel also suggested God working with clay:

‘Behold, the great Creator makes / Himself a house of clay’.

That takes up, and reworks, another textile image. John’s Gospel gets to the heart of the Christmas message with a line so solemn that Christians have been accustomed to drop to their right knee on hearing it read: ‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us’. That’s how we know it, but a more accurate translation is that the Divine Word ‘pitched his tent among us’. The houses that Pestel knew, however, were made of bricks not cloth, which is to say of clay, so he adapted the image. Or, just as likely, with that clay, he had the ‘house’ of the human body in mind. That would recall lines in Genesis, where God makes Adam out of clay, or ‘the dust of the ground’. In fact, the Hebrew word ‘Adam’ means just that – something like ‘earthling’ – just as ‘human’ is related to the Latin ‘humus’, meaning soil.

Whether weaving and wearing, or building, or sculpting, or potato printing, this is the message to stop us in our tracks at Christmas: that the Maker made himself human. There is something beautiful that we greet that with homemade presents, with printing cards, with decorating and baking, with craft and productivity, with paint and cloth, paper, wood, and yarn, and with that sublime sort of making that is music. As Pestel puts it, in closing ‘Behold, the great Creator makes’