Nicola Slee - Doing December Differently: An Alternative Christmas Handbook

Contents of book the individual contributors
Compilation 2006 Nicola Slee & Rosie Miles

First published 2006 by

Wild Goose Publications, 4th Floor, Savoy House, 140 Sauchiehall St, Glasgow G2 3DH, UK.
Wild Goose Publications is the publishing division of the Iona Community.
Scottish Charity No. SCO03794. Limited Company Reg. No. SCO96243.
www.ionabooks.com

ePub:ISBN 978-1-84952-046-1
Mobipocket:ISBN 978-1-84952-047-8
PDF:ISBN 978-1-84952-048-5

The publishers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Drummond Trust, 3 Pitt Terrace, Stirling FK8 2EY in producing this book.

All rights reserved. Apart from the circumstances specified below, no part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including photocopying or any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

Non-commercial use:
The material in this book may be used non-commercially for worship and group work without written permission from the publisher. If parts of the book are photocopied for such use, please make full acknowledgement of the source. Where a large number of copies are made, a donation may be made to the Iona Community, but this is not obligatory.

For any commercial use of the contents of this book, permission must be obtained in writing from the publisher in advance.

Nicola Slee and Rosie Miles have asserted their rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

To the Cropthorne six:
Kate Fyfe, Peter Kettle, Kate Lees,
Ailsa McLaren, Anne Pounds and Sue Tompkins,
with love and thanks,
and with thanks to Holland House, Cropthorne,
for enabling it to happen

Spirit of Christmas
pity our wandering
bring us back home

Pat Pinsent

For many people, the Christmas season (which starts around September) is a highly ambivalent time. In the West it has become a mega-fest of conspicuous consumption an excessive, prolonged and often frenetic period of spending, feasting, jollifications and exchanging of gifts and greetings, which leaves us at best stressed, and at worst under intolerable strain. Perhaps this has some deep roots, in the Northern hemisphere, in the need for a festival of light and warmth at the time of winter solstice: as nature asserts her powers of darkness and cold, humans assert their will to life by gathering around fires, lighting candles and filling their bellies against the bitter season. Although still maintaining some ancient religious roots, as a secular festival Christmas has largely been shorn from its biblical and liturgical context and has lost the rich and subversive range of meanings it holds within the Christian narrative. Only a few liturgically minded purists maintain any sense of the larger rhythm of the Christmas season the 40-day period starting with Advent and moving through Christmas to Epiphany and climaxing in Candlemas, a season marking and exploring in profound depths the mystery of Gods incarnation in the birth and life of Jesus Christ.

As part of the preparation for this book, a survey of three church congregations was undertaken to explore attitudes towards and feelings about Christmas. As might be expected, a variety of perspectives and views was expressed, from those who associate the season with exhaustion and a gritted determination to get through, on the one hand, to those who regard it as a time of heightened spiritual significance and celebration of the love of family and friends, on the other. Here are some comments that people made:

At best this is a time to stop, take stock, remember friends near and far, as well as a time to indulge in a certain form of hibernation (eating and enjoying fine food, then not going out much or doing much for several days). Somehow that does feel befitting of the time of year.

Christmas at the moment equals exhaustion.

The celebration of the winter solstice predates Christianity by many centuries, and no amount of do-gooding will alter the inbred need to whoop it up in the depths of winter.

Our family is not Christian or churchgoing and to make Christmas a spiritual event would exclude family, so I tend to see it as a family opportunity and go with the flow.

I struggle to keep the birth of the human face of God at the heart of things. Everything else is a by-product, some of it very good, other bits increasingly repellent.

If Christmas was taken away, how dull it would be. It is the climax of the year, and well worth preserving as it is very meaningful and necessary both spiritually and physically.

Christmas should be brief and beautiful all the rest is vanity.

Christmas is a difficult Christian festival because it has always been a blend of pre-Christian celebration with a Christian overlay. It is easy to feel that the pre-Christian is swamping the Christian, especially in our secular society but a bit difficult to complain about this when we infiltrated the existing celebrations (Saturnalia, Yule, etc )!

If the incarnate God means anything, it means among many other things celebrating physical elements (food, decorations, etc) as a manifestation of the spiritual. So we should not feel uncomfortable about the physical and material aspects of Christmas but use them to express and share joy.

People love it. Im sure God appreciates the attention as well!

These very mixed views reflect something of the tensions that most people we have spoken to experience in relation to the phenomenon of Christmas.

The media and advertising sell the season as a paean to an idealised notion of the nuclear family, in which children are made central and yet, paradoxically, their deepest needs are all too easily overlooked. The pressure on parents to buy the latest toys, gadgets and fads is immense. Those with little spare cash can find themselves in debt if they spend, and feeling inadequate if they dont. Christmas puts an intolerable strain on millions of families, a fair number of whom no longer conform to the traditional pattern of two partners (of different genders) married to each other and living under the one roof, with shared offspring. In Britain, much more than in other European countries, public life seems to close down for an extended period at Christmas, with businesses, shops, museums and galleries shutting their doors, and only limited public services carrying on as usual. Families are left to fend for themselves and to feed on each others company, without escape or support from outside the home. Many cannot sustain this pressure, and it is a well-known fact that there are more instances of domestic violence, family breakdown and murder at Christmas than at any other time of year.