One of the big themes of recent weeks has been the need to ‘save Christmas’. In the build-up to the announcement of Christmas ‘bubbles’, more than one newspaper headline declared ‘Two weeks to save Christmas’! When the announcement did come – three-household bubbles for five days, combined with the reopening of shops in many places – it was enthusiastically greeted as Christmas being ‘saved’. However, our political leaders continue to warn us not to get carried away, and news in recent days of a new strain of coronavirus has dampened enthusiasm. For a completely normal Christmas, we’ll have to wait till 2021 – if God spares us.. But still – the message remains that our actions over these days will be what saves Christmas this year.
Yet surely it’s all a bit ironic? Cast your mind back to the Christmas story and it couldn’t be more different. There was a ruler and a crisis summit, but King Herod had no intention of ‘saving Christmas’. In fact, it was the opposite; he did his level best to put the baby Jesus to death. The wise men were sent to Bethlehem under instructions to come back and tell him where Jesus was – ostensibly in order that he could worship him, but really so that he could kill him. So the idea of a government ‘saving Christmas’ is somewhat amusing since the government of Jesus’ day did everything it could to stop it before it started.
Now, as a Christian, I have to admit that the Bible doesn’t tell us to celebrate Jesus’ birth. The idea of doing so didn’t occur to Jesus’ followers until hundreds of years after Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem. Charles Dickens may not quite be ‘The Man Who Invented Christmas’ as the title of an enjoyable 2017 film declares, but many of the supposedly age-old traditions we associate with Christmas are newer than we realise. ‘Jingle Bells’ was originally written for the American holiday of Thanksgiving, carols are Christianised Victorian pub songs, and it is very unlikely that Jesus was born in December (the shepherds and their sheep would not have been outside!).
In fact, if you need an inexpensive stocking filler, I would recommend a cracking little book called A Christmas Cornucopia by Sunday Times bestselling author Mark Forsyth, which aims to uncover the hidden stories behind our Yuletide traditions. An endorsement on the front cover by Matthew Parris sums it up: ‘Everything we thought about Christmas is wrong! Great stuff!’
In light of the evidence, it’s too simplistic to write Christmas off as either ‘Victorian’ or ‘Pagan’. But it also a bit much to talk about ‘Getting back to the real meaning of Christmas’, ‘the commercialisation of Christmas’ or indeed ‘Putting Christ back into Christmas’. Many have a desire to ‘get back to’ something that never really existed in the first place.
One of my favourite quotes from the book reads as follows: ‘Once upon a time, there was no such thing as Christmas And then Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and after that there was still no such thing as Christmas. For hundreds of years’.
And yet the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem is still the most significant birth that has ever taken place. And if we take ‘Christmas’ as shorthand for Jesus coming into the world, then there is an even greater irony in the calls for us to ‘save Christmas’. Any time a leader tells us to “do our bit to save Christmas”, they unwittingly get things back to front.
Before Jesus’ birth, the angel told an apprehensive Joseph that ‘he will save his people from their sins’ (Matthew 1:21). As Jesus grew up, he lived the life of perfect obedience that we have so dismally failed to achieve, as a precursor to something even more significant than his birth. Bethlehem’s joy culminated in Jerusalem’s sorrow as Jesus faced the agonies of the cross and the perfect justice of God was carried out. The manger was just a step along the path leading to the one who was without sin becoming sin for us.
Strip away all the traditions, and the angel’s message to Joseph is at the heart of the Christmas story. That is why the idea of us ‘saving Christmas’ is so back to front. We can’t save Christmas; Christmas saves us.
Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 17th December 2020