The Trappings of Christmas : a meditation

Every year it happens, like one of those dreadful bites that supposedly reinfect you on the anniversary of the original attack. I begin the season with a mixture of apprehension and muddle-headedness, looking forward to the whole strange business as if this might be the Christmas that really does it for me after so many disappointments. 

As the days rush by, my annoyance grows and my goodwill wavers. Why is everyone in a bad mood - or is it just me? After nearly  50 years of practice, why do I still get stressed out worrying about what Christmas presents to buy? Just as often it is the lack of Christmasness that affects me as much as its pervasive commercial presence. This year I have to say, a little to my disappointment,  I have noticed no badly dressed, underweight Santas smoking in secret corners out the back of the shopping centres, and not many decorations in the stores, nor even the smell of freshly cut pine trees in Woolies. ("I think there are some plastic ones up near the cheeses," the check-out chick informed me when I inquired.)

I suspect, if my sons' attititudes are any indication, that Christmas is losing its magic - however tenuous and forced that magic may have become. And this year, when our local Carols by Candlelight was cancelled on account of a few desultory morning showers, I began to wonder if the whole thing was becoming too much trouble for everyone.

Perhaps as a consequence of all this, I found myself thinking of the old Yeats poem, "The Second Coming" and that oft-quoted line:  "What rough beast is this that slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

What kind of birth might we be celebrating in these unholy days of ours, I wondered. Yeats spoke of a beast with the head of a man moving through the desert. When we believe in nothing but what we can see with our eyes, when there is no divine spark nor even the possibility of one, are we allowing ourselves to become simply another animal with no special knowledge or claim on God's attention ... what or whoever that may be? If we are just another animal, how we can "celebrate" the birth of a child who claimed a direct connection with that God? 

Even the pagan elements of Christmas, carried over from the festival of the summer equinox, held a sense of the numinous, but now they too are threatened as the widespread obsession with climate change replaces our sense of the rhythm of the seasons with an anxiety that we are embarking on one hell of an endless summer. The scientists have told us it is so; so it must be so. The scientists tell us there was no Christmas star; so it must be so. No resurrection, no eternal life, no miracles, no God. The 'priests' of our time have declared it; so it must be so. 

In my own way, like most of us, I have joined in this frenzy of negation in various periods of my life. But now I find myself in the final stage of a Christmas ritual, a compulsive affair that changes slightly each year. I realise the simple exchange of gifts, the early morning phonecalls far away, and the big Christmas dinner will not be enough.  What will I do this year? I don't think I could seriously cop another session with Pastor Basil and the Lutherans. The summer festival at the Steiner School was something, but the children were left to sing the carols while we adults wimped out.

Now, like the hapless quarry of vampires gathering all the garlic, crucifixes and sharp stakes he can lay his hands on to keep the evil at bay, I find myself rummaging in the storeroom with my wife,  for ancient plastic bags of decorations, and rushing to pin them up around the living room. We must protect ourselves from a world without soul.

Photo: Christmas night market in Alice Springs.