Week 48.08

                          Tendring Topics……on Line

 

                         'The Bells of waiting Advent ring'*

 

            Next Sunday, 30^th November, is Advent Sunday, the beginning of the period in which the Christian Church prepares to celebrate the birthday of its founder. It is also the beginning of the Church's year. When I post this blog, on Thursday 27^th November, it will be exactly four weeks to Christmas Day. I hope therefore that I may be forgiven for giving over this blog almost entirely to Christmas issues. 

 

If therefore you are a modern follower of the early and unredeemed Ebenezer Scrooge, and are inclined to say  'Bah, Humbug!' when Christmas is mentioned, now might be a good time to switch off.

 

It must have been at this time of the year, sometime in the 1980s, that I was asked to provide about 1,000 words on the origins of Christmas for an Evening Gazette Christmas supplement.   Like the reliable hack that I was, I duly obliged and the article subsequently appeared.  I came across a copy of it recently, and still quite like it. Thirty-plus years on from the 1980s and with Christmas just round the corner, it occurred to me that blog readers might like it too.

 

            The first sentence dates it a bit I'm afraid.  If I were writing today it would surely refer to 'Dr. Who's Tardis' rather than  'A Wellsian time machine!'

 

*From 'Christmas' by John Betjeman

 

Origins of Christmas

           

If, by means of a Wellsian time machine, you were able to eavesdrop on the conversation in a Roman household, at this time of the year, but about two thousand years ago, you might (provided, of course, that you were familiar with colloquial First Century BC Latin!) have heard a conversation strikingly similar to family conversations going on in thousands of British homes today.

 

            'So that's settled then.  We'll give young Marcus a new hunting bow and, if you're sure it won't make her vainer than she is already, we'll give Antonia a pair of jewelled sandals.   How about Aunt Drusilla?  Yes, I know she's an old dragon but she is very good to the children and she does let us use that seaside villa of hers at Herculaneum….'

 

            And, if your time machine were able to penetrate the forests and swamps of north-western Europe where most of our ancestors originated, you'd have found barbarian tribesmen cutting down holly and ivy to decorate the Jarl's great hall for the coming feast, selecting and hauling in the Yule log for his hearth and choosing the fattest pigs for slaughter.

 

            They weren't preparing for Christmas, of course.  The Christian era was yet to dawn.  They were preparing for pagan festivals, in some ways startlingly similar to our own Christmas ones, that marked the end of the year.

 

            From very earliest times mankind has celebrated the time of the year when the sun ceased to set a little earlier every afternoon and to rise a little later every morning; when it became clear that the days were going to lengthen again and that, although still months away, the warmth and the colour of spring were on their way.

 

            It is difficult for us to appreciate that for tens of thousands of years our ancestors could never be quite certain that the days wouldn't continue to shorten until the sun disappeared altogether and the earth was plunged into eternal night.   The very first sign of a lengthening day was an event to celebrate, and for which to thank the gods.

 

            So, the Romans celebrated Saturnalia with feasting and the giving of gifts, and the Germanic and Norse tribes of northern Europe made merry at Yule.  Everyone knew that Yule was the time when the gods themselves walked the earth.  No-one would have been surprised if, when the feasting was at its height, and the ale flowed freely, there had been a thunderous knocking on the doors of the Hall and Woden himself, the All-Father, had been found standing there, demanding the Jarl's hospitality.  They'd have recognised him all right in his human guise.  He would have appeared as a one-eyed old man with a broad brimmed hat and a staff.  His two raven messengers Hugin and Mugin would have been perched on his shoulders and his eight-legged steed would have been trampling down the frozen snow outside.

 

            It is said that at the time of the Nativity of Christ, fishermen in the Mediterranean heard a voice from heaven crying in anguish 'Great Pan is dead!'  But although the old gods died and began to be forgotten with the dawn of the Christian era, the festivals held in their honour, in the spring, at harvest time and at the time of the return of the sun after the darkest days of winter, remained.

 

            It says much for the strength of those folk memories, and for the wisdom of the early Christian Church, that the old feasts and thanksgivings were not destroyed but were transmuted to serve the cause of the new religion.  The spring festival for instance, still retaining a name derived from Eostre, the Teutonic goddess of dawn, became Easter, the Christian festival of the dawn of hope of eternal life. 

 

            No-one knows the time of the year at which Jesus Christ was born, though modern scholarship suggests that it was unlikely to have been 'in the bleak midwinter'.  In the first centuries of the Christian era the birth of Jesus was celebrated at different times of the year by different branches of the Church, by some in January, by others in May.

 

            It was not for many years that our own familiar date of December 25^th was settled upon, but what more appropriate date could have been found?  The birth of Jesus signified the birth of hope for Christians in the same way that the first indications of the lengthening day had signified hope of the spring to the pagans.

 

            The festival coincided with Saturnalia when the Romans gave gifts and reversed the roles of master and slave;  'He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek'.  It coincided too with Yule.  The advent of the Son of God came at a time when the old gods had been accustomed to take on human guise and walk the earth.

 

            Thus did Christianity adapt and purify for its own purposes, festivals that from the beginning of time had expressed some of mankind's most deeply embedded spiritual instincts.

 

            If I were to rewrite that article today I might though be inclined to add the conviction of C.S.Lewis, Christian propagandist and author of the 'Narnia' children's stories, that the Christian Gospel was the fulfilment of the pagan religions of Europe as well as of the religion of the Hebrews.  I'm not sufficiently scholarly to know whether or not that conviction was justified.  I would certainly like it to be!

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Christmas Stamps

 

            I always await the arrival of the Royal Mail's special Christmas stamps with interest.  They are currently on sale and in use. What a pity that this year, once again, they carry only the secondary characteristics of Christmas, not the one that distinguishes it from all other of the commemorations that punctuate the year.  The pantomime characters are colourful and well produced but they really illustrate only a very minor element in the Christmas that most of us celebrate.

 

            What is wrong with the real Christmas story; the story of the temporarily homeless couple who found shelter in a 'lowly cattle shed' where the teenage mum gave birth to her baby boy; of the Palestinian shepherds who experienced an angelic visitation; of the Magi who brought them gifts; and of the family's flight, as political refugees, to neighbouring Egypt?

 

            Whether you are religious or not, whether you are Christian or not, this story has surely never been more relevant than it is today.   Is homelessness outside our experience, with the number of dispossessed householders rising week by week?  Do we have no children born in squalid surroundings?  Are we totally unacquainted with political refugees?

 

            The reason for the secularisation of our Christmas stamps is presumably the notion that we now live in a secular multi-faith country in which Christians are in a minority.   That simply isn't true.  Remember that at the last census, seventy percent of those who responded described themselves as Christian.  Can the National Secular Society; can any political party; assert that that proportion of the population proclaims itself to be their supporters?  

 

            I believe that I live in a still-Christian country in which adherents of every other faith who are prepared to accept our laws are not merely tolerated but welcomed.  I do not believe that we show 'respect' for other faiths by remaining mute about our own.  

 

            I don't believe that followers of other religions do object to Christian imagery on our postage stamps.  Why should they?  What is offensive in a picture of a young mother with her baby, of an angelic visitation (angels are common to all the main religions) or of 'wise men' on camels?    Should anyone really feel strongly about such images I am sure that there are plenty of ordinary, non-Christmas stamps available for them to use.

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                       A Christmas Present from the Chancellor?

 

            I welcome the Chancellor's measures aimed at alleviating the financial crisis and very much hope, as I am sure everyone does, that they will prove successful.

 

            Will they though? I am pleased to see a reduction in VAT, a tax that disproportionately affects the poor, but I doubt if a temporary reduction of 2.5 percent (tuppence-ha'penny in the pound!) is going to have much effect.  I think that it would take something like a ten percent reduction to make anyone decide (as was suggested on tv) to go out and buy an expensive new sports car or, rather more probably I think, a new winter coat, or a bicycle to get to work, or to have that noisy and inefficient boiler in the kitchen attended to.

 

            However, coupled with some income tax changes benefiting pensioners and others with only modest incomes, it may encourage some of us to make purchases and arrange for services that are badly needed but that we had been wondering if we could really afford.  Perhaps there will be enough of us to make a difference.  I hope so.

 

            I am pleased to note that when it comes to pay-back time the Chancellor is proposing to take one small step towards closing that yawning gap between the incomes of the seriously wealthy and the rest of us; the widest gap, I understand, in the whole of western Europe. There is still more to be done.

 

            It is well known that the very rich employ clever lawyers and accountants to exploit loopholes in the law that exempt their clients from paying even the relatively small amount of tax demanded of them.  I suggest that the government should seek even cleverer lawyers and accountants to plug those loopholes!

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                                     The Nature of Art

 

            'Was it a good idea for £40,000 to be spent on the work of art recently unveiled in Jaywick?' asks the Coast Gazette.  I'd like to ask a more basic question. Can the wooden skeleton of a structure that needs only a few sheets of roofing-felt to convert it into a roomy but rather basic poultry shed, possibly be art? Perhaps it can, since the word now encompasses an unmade bed and a sheep's carcase.  If Gainsborough and Constable, never mind Rembrandt and Michael Angelo, learned what nowadays passes for art they would surely be spinning in their graves!

 

            Anyone with £40,000 to spend on art is hereby invited to visit my driveway on any Monday afternoon. There they'll see unveiled and awaiting collection, the skilful juxtaposition of a half filled black plastic bag of refuse and an almost overflowing green salvage collection box, an arrangement challengingly symbolising waste (the plastic bag) and husbandry (the green box); a powerful image with a message for our times, surely worthy of the Turner Prize.  I expect it would be disqualified though.  My weekly produced work of art isn't totally devoid of purpose and meaning!