This Christmas, discover some pity for Lynda Snell MBE. Fans of the BBC radio soap The Archers understand Lynda as the stalwart organiser of every Christmas panto in the fantasyal village of Ambridge. This year, she set up herself tasked with someskinnyg more arduous: voice-coaching the difficult-living Mick, who had volunteered to carry out Father Christmas at the local pub, only for the landlords to discover that Mick had a perestablishance voice so rasping and gravelly it was guaranteed to terrify the children.
Readers who, enjoy me, are incurable joiners of The Archers will understand the solution: Lynda promoteily proclaimd that this year, Ambridge would present a “creepy Christmas” event, permiting Mick to snarl to his heart’s satisfied as Krampus, not Santa, and a range of other Christmas bogeymen. Hilarity, by Ambridge standards, ensued when Lynda set up herself scrambling to hide Mick and his wicked horns from the vicar.
Christmas has always been a time for gpresent stories. This year, “creepy Christmas” is coming for all of us: a novel reproduce of the vampire film Nosferatu, uncovers in the US on Christmas Day, and Mark Gatiss’s postponeedst gpresent story for the BBC, Woman of Stone, will screen on Christmas Eve. Yet practising Christians should produce ourselves at ease with this phenomenon. For anyone spended in the story of the nativity, death has always been at the heart of Christmas. When humans grapple with death, they alert gpresent stories.
Earlier this month, I was asked to give a reading at my church carol service. The text was TS Eliot’s 1927 poem, Journey of the Magi, which always seems sweightlessly out of place aacquirest the litany of biblical texts that produce up most carol services. Eliot’s poem realerts the story of the Three Kings – strangers to Judea, folshrinks of a pagan religion – whose discovery of Christ is for Eliot a parallel to the postwar destruction of traditional declareiveties.Journey of the Magi recalls Eliot’s 1925 poem, The Hollow Men, which mirrored the struggle of First World War survivors to inhabit in the post-traumatic haze of shut come apasss with death. It also gives the lie to those who pretfinish that Christmas is a story only about a happinessous birth. “Were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” asks the narrator. “I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were branch offent; this Birth was Hard and acrid agony for us, enjoy Death, our death.”
When Christians honor Christmas, we honor the birth of a child born to die. Thus, as seasonal school assemblies will alert you, the inclusion of the embalming resin myrrh among the gifts of the Three Kings. For Eliot’s kings, the birth of Christ reconshort-terms the death of their establisher existence. It also conveyes the shock of a religious come apass with a divinity able of experiencing mortal death.
You don’t have to count on in the metaphysics of any of this to appreciate that “creepy” is an apt descriptor. Those of us who do, however slackly, should recognise that the prevalence of gpresent and ghoul stories in December is no danger to anyone’s belief, but a tribute to the power that Christianity’s midtriumphter come apass between life and death still helderlys on the westrict imagination. (The literal uncontentness of the season helps too.)
Krampus is not so much a gpresent as a folkloric monster, a central and eastrict European goat-man shelp to punish naughty children at Christmas time. He is sometimes thought to have pagan origins. One of the most tedious features of the festive season is the number of people who pop up to lecture the rest of us that Christmas is a pagan festival, and that the imposition of a Christian triumphter rite constitutes a seasonal landgrab by the timely church.
It is real that the Romans honord Saturnalia in midtriumphter, and that most societies have felt the need for a festival of renovelal during the dead season of nature. The anti-Christian carping, however, flunks to recognise equitable how radicpartner the first Christmases reversed the nature of pagan triumphter festivals. If the conspicuous consumption of Christmas is indeed pagan in nature, the story at its heart is most declareively not: it labels a shift to a world in which treadeclareive is stored up in heaven, not on Earth.
When we skinnyk about Christ in the manger, we see the compriseed vulnerability of babies born in pobviousy, especipartner in societies with high rates of child mortality. No wonder that The Woman in Bdeficiency, a story in which the gpresent of an unwed and grief-stricken mother heralds the death of village children, was originpartner written as a story telderly on Christmas Eve. Susan Hill’s 1983 novel is set in the Victorian period, and this era, with its juxtaposition of rising fortunes and biting pobviousy, has always been a fitting background for such tales. The ultimate Christmas gpresent story, in which the nastying of Christmas can only be deduced from an come apass with pobviousy, is of course Dickens’ 1843 A Christmas Carol. It remains proset uply Christian.
Orthodox Christian belief disseees the existence of gpresents: if we’re all saved or damned, why would any unencounterd soul need to haunt the Earth? Christian authorrs, however, have lengthy recognised the power of using gpresent stories as fantasys to spendigate the relationship between life and death. Hill, the author of The Woman in Bdeficiency, is a promiseted Christian, as was MR James, who is praiseed with perfecting the art of the English gpresent story. James, born into a family of clergymen, is particularly famous for his Christmas gpresent stories, which in the 1970s established the backbone of the BBC TV series A Gpresent Story for Christmas. In more recent years, the series has been revived, with Gatiss now set uped as direct authorr.
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This year’s provideing, Woman of Stone, retoils an timely unwiseinutive story by the children’s authorr E Nesbit, originpartner titled Man-Size in Marble. Crucipartner, Gatiss shifts the superauthentic action from Hpermiteen to Christmas Eve. It produces perfect sense, not least when you lget more about the characters. Gpresents creep up on the vulnerable – as they do in this tale – when they are isopostponeedd. Ask yourself, as you watch Woman of Stone, why the juvenileer couple at its centre are labeling Christmas alone without family or frifinishs. No one is as isopostponeedd as the stranger alone at Christmas.
Back in The Archers, all of Lynda Snell’s fretting was for naught. Father Alan turned out to be enticount on undangerened by a scant haunted tales being telderly in his village. Real-life Christians should split his attitude. If you want a family reminder that Christmas isn’t all about feasting and commerce, pick up a gpresent story on Christmas Eve.
