It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. You can say that again, albeit you’d be about a month late in saying it. The retail and hospitality trades have been trying to convince us it’s Christmas since early November at least, and in many cases much longer, and by the time we get to next weekend, and into December, our nation will be in full-on festive mode.

Our towns centres are already awash with Christmas lights, as high street traders seek to make the most of the first unrestricted Christmas in three years, and counteract the ever-growing threat of online retailers; our garden centres have all been transformed into “winter wonderlands” since early November, with barely a trace of a plant or a bag of potting compost until you’ve made it through the dazzling displays of lights and baubles and the animated Santas; and the airwaves and playlists will from December 1st, if not before, be dominated by the well-loved works of Slade, Wizzard, The Pogues, Chris Rea, Mariah Carey et al.

There's now a well established yet unofficial convention that December equals Christmas, certainly in terms of decorations and radio playlists - due, I think, to the ubiquity of Advent Calendars, which were relatively rare and chocolate free in my 1960s childhood, then the norm for any household with children since around 1980, but these days used by all ages, often featuring not just chocolates but other edible treats too. 

So for many, December 1st means Christmas has started. And yet…..it isn’t Christmas just because it's December. Christmas starts on December 25th and lasts until January 6th. This past Sunday was Advent Sunday, traditionally the start of a season of preparation and penitence, of restraint and reflection, ahead of the midwinter feast.

An Advent Wreath

Please don’t get me wrong or dismiss me as a religious zealot or killjoy: I love Christmas, not despite but because of its secular tackiness, cheesiness, over-indulgence, and excesses. It’s a treat for all of us at a time of the year which can seem very gloomy, but like all treats, it’s a treat because it’s rare and time-limited. I love Roy Wood’s I wish it could be Christmas every day but that sentiment is so very wrong. If it was always Christmas, it wouldn’t be special, wouldn’t be a treat and wouldn’t be fun.

Now of course in reality, we can’t pretend Christmas isn’t coming. If we are going to enjoy Christmas, we obviously need to celebrate and enjoy many aspects of it in the weeks leading up to it. Buying presents, sending cards, putting up decorations, planning menus, enjoying concerts, events and parties with our friends and colleagues is all part of Christmas, and clearly can’t be done on or after the 25th. 

But do we have to completely overlook the notion of a season of preparation, of Advent? The practice of a period of preparation and abstinence in advance of a joyful feast is common to many other religions, most notably in Islam, with Ramadan followed by Eid. 

Preparation, abstinence and reflection followed by celebration and indulgence is, surely, good for the soul. Or to put it another way, celebration and indulgence without some measure of restraint and context in advance of it is surely not good for the soul.

As a society, we have become very bad at waiting for anything, at any form of delayed gratification, and I plead as guilty as anyone to this. Fast Food, seven-day opening, same-day delivery and Amazon Prime mean that many of us have forgotten what it means to wait for anything. I grew up in the days of “allow 28 days for delivery”, which now seems like a joke. Who would wait 28 days for anything these days?

Yet waiting is, surely, good for us at times. A bit of imposed patience never did anyone any harm. It’s a given of good parenting not to give in to childrens’ every “I want”, not to indulge their every wish, for fear of spoiling them, yet we as adults perhaps don’t practise what we preach. We want it now? We get it tomorrow, thanks to Amazon Prime and some hard-pressed van driver. Convenient, yes, but seldom vital.

Religion has taught us to believe some pretty daft stuff over the years, and to an extent it still does. Christianity has a lot to answer for in terms of its being misused as an excuse for bigotry, prejudice and intolerance. Which is why I have always chosen to follow my religion at a safe distance, shamelessly taking the bits I agree with and rejecting those with which I disagree. And one of the bits of Christianity which I most appreciate is the way it gives a pattern and a rhythm to our lives which is so in tune with the patterns and rhythms of nature itself, if that doesn’t sound too flaky. By hijacking pre-Christian, pagan midwinter celebrations, Christianity taps into our need for some light and cheerfulness, “in the bleak midwinter”, and by encouraging us to wait patiently for the fun and festivity, rather than jumping the gun, it taps into a bit of useful psychology and self-discipline.

So instead of joining Noddy Holder in shouting “It’s Christmassss!” on December 1st, I would suggest that it’s more fun, and better for us, to enjoy Advent for what it is? 

Yes, I have already put up some decorations, but I always start with a few, advent-themed ones - just a few candle bridges in windows, an advent wreath with candles and an advent calendar - but I’ll leave other decorations until later in December. Yes, I will listen to seasonal music, but I’ll start with my Advent Playlist (click those words for the Spotify Link), which contains some simply wonderful and oft-neglected sacred music and hymns, plus, as is my wont, some secular songs that fit the season.

Then when Christmas finally comes, I’ll enjoy all 12 days of it, and I'll be saying "It's Christmas" until January 6th, when much of the secular world will have long since moved on and started eating Creme Eggs.

It Came Upon The Midnight Clear

We have reached that time of year when Christmas music, be it sacred or secular, assaults our senses. The canon of secular songs forces its way into our consciousness from early November onwards whether we like it or not, and even though many of those songs are on our guilty pleasures list, it is difficult to avoid tiring of them before Advent has started, let alone Christmas. I try in vain to avoid them until well into December, yet have to admit to a frisson of childlike excitement when I hear Fairytale of New York or I Wish it could be Christmas every Day, to name but two, for the first time each year. And when Perry Como sings It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas I have to agree with him.

Fortunately, sacred Christmas music is a little easier to avoid, in that it is less commonly heard in supermarkets and garden centres, but one is nevertheless likely to have sung O Come All Ye Faithful several times before we get anywhere near the “Happy Morning” on which we can sing “Yea, Lord We Greet Thee”. These days, the John Rutter standards are also likely to have become over-familiar by mid-December if you are involved in a church, school or choir, and I must even admit to a certain weariness with the standards such as Hark the Herald, While Shepherds Watched, Silent Night and even Away in a Manger.

Yet there are a number of wonderful Christmas Carols which are neglected, and would be unlikely to feature in the answer of any non-churchgoer asked to name their Top Five Christmas Carols. I would cite as examples See Amid the Winter’s Snow, Christians Awake (which can really only be sung on Christmas Day, and so in my memories of childhood carries a unique feel of excited Christmas Morning services) and above all, It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.

If you know a lot about me, you’ll now see where this post is heading: It Came upon the Midnight Clear is indeed a Unitarian carol, the only one to have reached the mainstream, written by Edmund Hamilton Sears (1810-1876), an American Unitarian Preacher and first heard in 1849. It is, and always has been, my favourite Christmas hymn. I inherited my love of it from my late father, unitarian minister and liberal theologian Revd Dr Arthur Long. We sang it at his funeral, just before Christmas 2006. To me, no hymn better evokes the message of Christmas, yet it is not exactly cheerful or festive, and some would say not even Christian. All the better for it, in my opinion. I am never sure how well known it is in our secular age, but I think any churchgoer will know it. For those who don’t, here it is, performed by the peerless Choir of King's College Cambridge in 2006:-

The first verse seems to be heading in a relatively orthodox direction, evoking traditional images of a still and silent night interrupted by the song of the Angels:

It came upon the midnight clear,

That glorious song of old,

From angels bending near the earth

To touch their harps of gold!

Peace on the earth, goodwill to men,

From heaven's all gracious King!

The world in solemn stillness lay

To hear the angels sing.

Yet Sears was writing at a time when he was preoccupied by events in a turbulent world, and with threatened revolutionary rumblings in Europe and the United States' war with Mexico on his mind, he portrayed the world in a later verse as dark, full of "sin and strife," and not hearing the Christmas message:

Yet with the woes of sin and strife

The world has suffered long;

Beneath the angel-strain have rolled

Two thousand years of wrong;

And man, at war with man, hears not

The love song which they bring:

O hush the noise, ye men of strife,

And hear the angels sing.

So here we have the Christmas message of Peace on Earth, Goodwill to all Men well and truly deflated. At this point, we are in the same territory as Greg Lake’s much-loved anti-Christmas song, I Believe in Father Christmas, which brilliantly debunks the peace and goodwill message. It Came upon the Midnight Clear could indeed be construed at this point as an anti-Christmas hymn. It has in the past been criticized for not even mentioning the Christ-child. British scholar Erik Routley wrote that "the hymn is little more than an ethical song, extolling the worth and splendour of peace among men."

So not very Christian then? Well perhaps not. Yet it is most ironic to learn that Edmund Sears, author of this "humanist" carol, was in fact a very much a Unitarian Christian. "The word God may be uttered without emotion," he told his congregation, "while the word Jesus opens the heart, and touches the place of tears." For Sears, Christ was the incarnation of the Divine Word, and a mediator who alone could bridge "the awful gulf between God and man." In other words, he saw Jesus Christ as the metaphorical, rather than literal, son of God. Pretty orthodox Unitarian Christianity: God reaching down to humanity, through his metaphorical son as a prophet, but his "peace" contingent upon a human response rather than by divine intervention.

Although as a Unitarian, Sears rejected the doctrine of original sin which is so central to mainstream Christianity, he saw all human groups and individuals as having the potential for evil. At the same time he wrote of people as fashioned in the image of God and blessed with varying degrees of development in their spiritual nature. So there is always the prospect of redemption, of good overcoming evil, leaving room for optimism and an uplifting conclusion to his hymn about Christmas which has become his only legacy of significance.

So for me, the most appealing aspect of this carol (other than Arthur Sullivan’s beautiful melody) is the optimism of the last verse, which never fails to lift my spirits in the face of so much that’s wrong in the world:

For lo! the days are hastening on,

By prophet bards foretold,

When, with the ever-circling years,

Comes round the Age of Gold;

When peace shall over all the earth

Its ancient splendours fling,

And the whole world give back the song

Which now the angels sing.

Naïve optimism? Arguably so at the end of 2016, a year in which we have so often been reminded of mankind’s capacity for stupidity at best, downright evil at worst. Yet if we can’t have hope at Christmas, seeing the coming of the Christ-Child as a symbol of light and warmth at the darkest and coldest time of the year, then truly we have given up on life.