6th December 2014

Tendring Topics………on line

‘The time draws near the birth of Christ………’

          We are in the Christian season of ‘Advent’, the few weeks before Christmas when it was customary for Christians to prepare for the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ ‘In a lowly cattle shed’ in Bethlehem some two thousand years ago.

            Sadly, except in churches and chapels, there’s little evidence of the celebration of one of the most important events of the Christian year, though there are plenty of reindeer, toboggans, Christmas Trees, Christmas fairies and Santas to be found.  It is though, difficult to find unequivocally Christian greetings cards in the shops. News bulletins on tv and radio tell us that primary school children nowadays perform in ‘mid-winter festival’ plays at Christmas time instead of the traditional Nativity Plays that have been part of the pre-Christmas life of primary schools for generations. Ask at any post office for Christmas stamps and you’ll be shown the, admittedly very attractive, secular ones.  You have to make a special request for some of the ‘Madonna and Child’ first or second class stamps that are now available every year.  They’ll be found for you, though it may be made clear that it’s an unusual request.

            It is said that the female partner (at one time I’d have said ‘the wife’) of a young couple on a pre-Christmas shopping trip was attracted to a particularly bright display in a shop window.  She returned disgusted to her partner, ‘D’you know; over there, they’re even trying to drag religion into Christmas!’   All of this is said to be because we are a multi-faith and multicultural society and public celebration of a Christian festival might cause offence to those of other or no faith.  I’m convinced that that is total nonsense.   It’s a strange religion that takes offence at the story of a young woman who takes shelter in a cattle-shed to have her baby on a cold winter’s night in Palestine.   In any case we don’t mind Jews, Muslims and Hindus observing their holy days.  It is surely patronising and insulting to suggest that we Christians respect the faith of others and they do not.

            The real enemy of the Christmas story is the spirit of consumerism and greed which does its best to replace the real Christmas with an artificial one of greed, selfishness, gluttony and booze – one in which folk of any faith (but preferable of none!) can take part wholeheartedly.  I find it useful to personify that anti-faith spirit as the great god Mammon, manifest to us mortals in his unholy trinity of productivity, profitability and cost effectiveness.  Mammon’s Christless festival is centred on 25^th December but its true unholy days are appropriately named Black Friday the last Friday in November, and the week following 25^th December, when devotees queue for hours, then riot and quarrel with each-other in their eagerness to acquire the very latest consumer-desirables a little cheaper than they could get them at any other time of the year. Meanwhile the thousands rejected by Mammon (he is quite arbitrary in his choice of favourites) have to queue at Food Banks to keep themselves and their families from starvation and, as they shiver in the December winds, have to choose daily  between eating and heating.

             Sixty years ago former Poet Laureate the late Sir John Betjeman wrote a satirical poem Advent 1955 about the commercialisation of Christmas in those days. Here are a few lines from it:

We raise the price of things in shops,
We give plain boxes fancy tops
And lines which traders cannot sell
Thus parcell'd go extremely well
We dole out bribes we call a present
To those to whom we must be pleasant
For business reasons. Our defence is
These bribes are charged against expenses
And bring relief in Income Tax

 The devotees of Mammon have learned a trick or two since those days.  They no longer ‘raise the price of things in shops’.  They temporarily reduce them and call it a pre-Christmas Sale.   There’s more profit on lots of things sold at a lower price than on just a few things sold at a higher one!  And those who manage to persuade potential customers that there’s a special, ‘pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap, day called ‘Black Friday’ are on their way to becoming  millionaires.

Chancellors of the Exchequer have also learned a trick or two!   I began spare-time freelance writing in the early ‘50s and by the end of the decade had acquired several regular clients. In those days editors would send regular contributors a bottle of single-malt whisky, or something equally worth-while, as a Christmas present.   When such presents became no longer ‘tax deductable’ those annual editorial offerings dwindled to ‘a really nice Christmas card’ or perhaps ‘a useful commercial calendar’!   Sir John finished his poem with a rhyming verse that has stuck in my memory as summing up, not only the real meaning of Christmas, but what it is that is unique – and very special – to the Christian faith:

The time draws near the birth of Christ,

A present that can not be priced,

 Given two thousand years ago.

And if God had not given so,

He still would be a distant stranger

And not the baby in a manger.

Our God is not a distant stranger.  He is still to be found in the baby in the manger and in the suffering man upon a cross - and today, in those who serve and love their fellow men and women, who prefer co-operation to competition, and who make peace not war.  We Quakers believe that everyone in the world of whatever race, colour or creed, has ‘that of God’, a divine spark, within his or her soul.  It is that within us that leads us towards kindliness, forgiveness and peace and away from anger, vengeance and greed. That divine spark is, says St. John in his Gospel, ‘the true light of God’ that shines in the darkness and cannot be overwhelmed by it.

Week 51.10 21 December 2010

Tendring Topics……..on Line

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

There is a, possibly apocryphal, story of a young couple doing their Christmas shopping and looking at all the depictions of Santa Claus, Rudolph the reindeer, gnomes and fairies in the shop windows. The young woman spotted one shop window with a baby in a manger and shepherds and wise men in attendance. She called to her husband or (since they were a
thoroughly modern couple) her partner. ‘Look at this dear’, she said, ‘would you believe it! They’re even dragging religion into Christmas now!’


In an article in the Christmas number of the Radio Times Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, writes of the modern practice of describing Christmas as the Midwinter Festival and replacing traditional junior school Nativity Plays with winter morality plays having no religious theme. This is presumably because we now live in a multi-faith society and it is feared that a purely Christian festival might offend those of other religious faiths or of none. Dr Rowan Williams points out that many adherents of other faiths are happy to join with Christians in remembering and re-enacting the Nativity story. Muslims, in particular, accept the story of Jesus’ miraculous birth, while rejecting his crucifixion and resurrection. Dr Williams says that one of the best film versions of the Nativity that he has seen was made by an Iranian Muslim film company.

In any case, don’t the apostles of ‘political correctness’ who are so mindful for the feelings of those with other faiths, ever consider the possibility that Christians (still quite a substantial religious group in the UK!) could be offended by their festival having been taken over by secular materialism; what in an earlier age might have been described as the worship and service of Mammon?

Looking at the colourful illustrations of happy children in the pages of the daily Coastal Gazette and the Clacton Gazette during the week before Christmas, I was cheered and relieved to note that by far the greater number of end-of-term primary school Christmas dramas were straightforward old-fashioned Nativity Plays with a baby in a manger, a bashful Joseph and Mary, shepherds, wise men and angels. Long may they remain so!

I feel no need to conceal my Christian faith, shaky and full of doubt as it often is. I wish all blog readers a joyful Christmas and a peaceful and fulfilled New Year. May the God revealed to us in the manger of ‘a lowly cattle shed’ bless us all.

'In a lowly cattle shed'. The Christmas Crib at St. James' (Church of England) parish church, Clacton-on-Sea

‘Black is actually white'

Nobody is saying that – yet. But, when I hear some of the claims of the present government, I am expecting to hear it any day! There is, for instance, the claim that reducing unemployment pay helps the jobless – it gives them an extra incentive to look for a non-existent job!

Then there is the insistent claim that government is divesting itself of its powers and returning them to ‘the people’ and ‘to local communities’. I have been urging that for years! Ever since the end of World War II central government has been taking responsibility for running local services from the representatives of local people, their elected district councils and either controlling them directly itself or handing them over to giant private corporations. Was that to be reversed?

Not a bit of it. Central government is now taking over the control of the letting of socially provided housing accommodation from elected councils ‘Nanny knows best dear’. It is also taking control of schools away from local democratic control and handing it, with the cash that goes with it, over to head teachers. But ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’ as those head teachers will discover if their syllabuses and teaching practices begin to stray too far from what central government (not local people) consider desirable.

Political control of Police Forces is to be taken away from existing Police Committees (whose members, though not directly elected, did at least represent local communities) and handed over to single, directly elected, Police Commissioners (no doubt on a fat-cat salary!) Similarly the government would like to transform local authorities, as they exist today, to be presided over by directly elected Mayors with executive powers. These measures may make for greater efficiency, but they certainly don’t ‘give power to the people’. They would mean that control of the police and of local administration would pass from representative committees to elected dictatorships. It is always easier to bribe or bully a single individual than the members of a committee!

Then there is the matter of university tuition fees, an issue that has provoked, and will continue to provoke, both strong peaceful protest, and angry and destructive riots. But ‘students don’t have to pay a penny up front’ the government insists plaintively. ‘Don’t they understand that no-one has to pay anything at all until his or her income exceeds £21,000 a year. Many students will never pay off their nominal debt. More, rather than less, students from poorer families will be attracted to University education’. Perhaps some, the irresponsible, will be attracted. It will be the more responsible less-than-wealthy who will be deterred. I know that my wife and I would never have encouraged a child of ours to incur a debt of perhaps £40,000 or £50,000 (what’s an odd £10,000 to the seriously wealthy!) hanging over his head for all his working life. The fact that he might never pay it off would have made the prospect additionally abhorrent rather than more attractive. It might have been thought that the current financial crisis would have made even members of the present government (few, if any, of whom have ever known financial hardship) appreciate the fear of debt felt by what used to be known as ‘the deserving poor’ – but apparently not!

But that’s not all. We all know, because top politicians have told us so often, that they’re very keen on keeping seriously and chronically ill patients in their own homes so that they don’t have to spend their last months or years in hospital or a care home. Could it be to facilitate this that the government is phasing out the disability living allowance that pays for carers and other necessities for the bedridden and housebound. This takes effect immediately for new applicants. For those at present in receipt of the allowance it will be phased out in 2015. Perhaps it is to give the disabled an added incentive ‘to rise, take up their beds, and walk’!

‘Black’ may not yet have been officially declared to be ‘white’ but it is certainly beginning to look distinctly ‘greyish’. And now, I learn, the government is trying to find means of measuring the happiness of the electorate! I was about to write that Britain today is looking more and more like George Orwell’s vision of 1984 – but not even George Orwell’s fertile imagination had hit on the idea of a Happiness Gauge!

A bit less seriously!

As Christmas is now just days away, it occurs to me that some readers – or younger members of their families – might be amused by a couple of light-hearted Christmassy pieces of verse that my wife Heather and I wrote many years ago to amuse our grandchildren. You can guess roughly how many years ago by the fact that all three of those grandchildren are now in their late twenties!

When Santa got stuck in a Chimney….

When Santa got stuck in a chimney
Long ago on a cold winter’s night;
You never heard such a commotion,
You never did see such a sight!

There was soot over mother’s best carpet –
There was soot on the furniture too –
And Santa Claus thought that his boots were on fire
The night he got stuck in a flue.

The reindeer pulled hard on their traces.
(You’d have thought he was stuck there with glue!)
Till at last, in a rush, with a huff and a puff,
Old Santa popped out of the flue.

He sent his red coat to the cleaners
And he said, as he scratched his grey head.
‘Next year I’ll wait till the family’s asleep
And creep in through a window instead!’

Good King Wenceslas

Good King Wenceslas is, as far as I know, the only Christmas carol with no reference to the Nativity. It is also not strictly a Christmas carol at all but a ballad for St. Stephen’s Day, better known to most of us as Boxing Day. It does though carry the strong Christian message of the responsibility of the wealthy and privileged towards the less fortunate.

When I was a small boy I quite thought that the King’s name was Wenslas and that he ‘last looked out’. I had a vision of an important looking man with a crown on his head and wearing a dressing gown who, before going to bed, opened the front door of his palace to put the cat out and leave a note for the milkman in the morning. When he did this on 26th December he spotted this poor old man grubbing through the snow looking for a few sticks of firewood!

Many years later, as a prisoner of war, I spent two Christmases in what had been King Wenceslas’ Kingdom of Bohemia. The snow there really was deep and crisp and even. Looking across snowfields toward distant forest and mountains it was easy to imagine the scene that King Wenceslas had surveyed on that Boxing Day night centuries earlier. Later, hitch-hiking my way through Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia after the collapse of Nazi Germany in May 1945, I found my way to Prague where I celebrated with jubilant Czechs before moving on. In Wenceslas Square (Prague’s main square), there was the King himself, on his charger, dominating the scene. He, like me, had survived World War II!

Many more years passed and one Christmas, to entertain our grandchildren, my wife Heather and I composed a piece of verse that could have been a prelude to the events recorded in the carol. It was hardly fair on King Wenceslas who, I have little doubt, was a kind and generous man throughout his life. After a thousand years I hope he won’t mind. Here it is:

King Wenceslas hung his stocking up on 24th December.
‘Will Father Christmas call on me. I hope he will remember’.
He early went to bed that night, woke early in the morning;
Roused his pageboy with a shout, as the day was dawning.
‘At the bottom of my bed, there should be a present;
A new gold ring would be quite nice, or a fine fat pheasant!’
At the bottom of the bed, the pageboy found a letter:
Dear King, Be nicer to the poor and I’ll like you better.
It’s a rich man’s job to see beggars don’t go hungry.
If this warning you ignore, I’ll be very angry.
Tomorrow is St. Stephen’s Day. Please look out of doors.
Help the poor man you’ll see there.
Yours truly, Santa Claus

Not great poetry – but it amused the grandchildren!

Happy Christmas to all!