Celebrating Winter Binge

While the tabloid press mislead everyone with the urban myth of the banning of the traditional English Christmas by politically correct secular councillors, and the great and the good including archbishops and even their Muslim friends tut tut in horror some of us as Christians feel a much greater issue is at stake.

Of course Christmas has not been banned; the furore is just part of the racist hysteria and backlash against those who have struggled for years to promote diversity and racial justice, and serves as just another weapon in the vilification of the "other" in our society.

At this time of year I remember with affection Oliver Cromwell who for very good and Christian reasons in the 1650's actually did ban Christmas. And I lament the downward slide back into the secular winterbinge we now suffer. Charles Dickens and the late victorians who invented Santa have much blame to bear, for it was they who trivialised, and sentimentalised the nativity season. The secularised English winterbinge with its images of snow and robins, reindeer and bauble bedecked spruce trees is a very late invented tradition. As everyone says it gets earlier and worse each year and the biggest joy that marks a successful Christmas is booming retail sales which boost the flagging British and global economy.

Of course there is goodwill, and some extra giving to charity.. see For a few days homeless people may be taken off the street and kept warm and well fed, toys are collected and given to the poorest families, and the height of radical Christmas chic is to buy a goat for a farmer in Africa as the present for the auntie who already has everything (see http://shop.christianaid.org.uk/ ). Yet the injustice and suffering and warfare contiue around the world for the other 364 days each year. There's a warm self righteous glow, but nothing is really changed.

For most people though the festive season is just that. An orgy of spending followed by an orgy or eating drinking, sub-misltoe kissing and worse! And a guilt filled January where resoultions for a healthier lifestyle sometimes make it to about the 15th.

What a tragedy and a travesty of the feast of the Incarnation.. !

There is one tradition of the English Christmas that is beyond compare. The performance of Handel's Messiah (which I was privileged to hear last night in Preston's Guildhall). There is no way of avoiding the mystery and the challenge of the story for the words that are set to music are pure Scripture, glorious in ispiration and revelaing the greatest story every told. What a wonderful way to memorise Bible verses. No wonder everyone stands as the choir booms out the Hallelujah chorus. One only wonders how many of the singers and the orchestra fully understand the significance of the lyrics.

Indeed at its root the celebration of Christmas should be about the miracle of "the word made flesh",

As Charles Wesly put it
"our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man"

As Graham Kendrick put it

From heaven you came, helpless babe,
Entered our world, your glory veiled;
Not to be served but to serve,
And give Your life That we might live.

Come see His hands And His feet,
The scars that speak of sacrifice;
Hands that flung stars Into space
To cruel nails Surrendered.


If this is the true meaning of Christmas it should transform our lives, it should transform our world..

And it is something to celebrate, with a song and a carol or two such as "Joy to the World"

Joy to the world! the Lord is come:
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare him room,
And heaven and nature sing (x2) And heaven,and heaven and nature sing.

And even I will not say no to a helping of Christmas pud

and at least one more beer.