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A day to unwrap the present

A version of this piece was published in the Independent on the 26th December 2000, under the headline ‘Partridges and pear trees – now on special offer’.


An afterglow or an anticlimax? After the hype and the hyperactivity that lead up to Christmas Day, the day that follows holds out to some the promise of a blissful calm – but to others it will seem merely flat. Of course, there are further social calls to make or receive, and the late delivery of cards and possibly presents to maintain a glimmer of anticipation; but the peak of the festive season is now behind us and we are heading back down to the plain reality of the daily round. The fairy lights are going out all over Europe. The magic (if magic there was) has gone, and what remains is yesterday’s leftovers. After the high, the cold turkey.

Tradition may denote today the second day of Christmas – and whether or not two turtle doves is a better gift than a partridge in a pear tree, the song suggests that the best is still to come – but our consumer calendar says otherwise. 25 December now effectively concludes a season that began around 6 November, as soon as the imaginations of children could be moved on from fireworks to stockings. Indeed, so long already have the malls been decked with boughs of holly that many of us have had enough of ‘merriment’ by now and are impatient for the next event.

Commerce abhors a vacuum, and the stores are quick to fill it. The ads that punctuate the films that didn’t quite make Christmas Day announce the immediate advent of the end-of-season sales. There is relentless effort to re-excite our appetite for shopping, to turn our minds to all the things we ‘still really want’. The prices are dropping with the needles off the tree – and perhaps a few more purchases will keep us happy until New Year’s Eve, and another fix of bonhomie. And then, of course, it’s time to think of our summer holidays…

One wonders how the mother of Jesus felt the morning after the exhaustion and euphoria of his birth. The unexpected intrusion of the shepherds, with their incoherent talk of angels, was receding into memory. The arrival of the magi with their curious gifts (which the church will celebrate in 12 days’ time) lay in the unknown future, maybe a year or more ahead. What Mary was left with was an abiding joy, no doubt, but also, one imagines, a frightening sense of responsibility. For her, yesterday had been a day not of magic but of miracle – not only the miracle of new life but the miracle of the Incarnation – and that miracle still depended on her and demanded her response, day after day and (whatever the carols may say about Jesus not crying) night after night. A child is for life, after all, not just for Christmas.

And, in his particular case, for much more than life. In a shocking juxtaposition, the church has chosen to celebrate the feast of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, on the day immediately after Christmas. It is a startling reminder that the inevitable outcome of the birth of Mary’s son was his execution – and that the corollary for those who seek the new life that he offers is their own metaphorical dying. Not that the story of Stephen is a morbid one, for it was he who at his trial had a vision of the heavens opened and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. This is the triumphant conclusion of the Nativity: that what was begun on Christmas Day leads, through sacrifice and suffering, to culminate in glory.

It was on the feast of Stephen, so the carol tells us, that good King Wenceslas showed kindness to a poor man gathering winter fuel. And a different tradition makes today Boxing Day, when the more affluent members of English society gave presents to their dependants and employees. Such acts of generosity, not just to family and friends but to those who truly need it, should be not the modest expression of a short-lived ‘goodwill’ – a quick nod in the direction of unselfishness – but the first signs of a settled determination to love our neighbour as ourselves, as Jesus taught us to, and did himself.

Our superficial culture, which lives by appetite rather than reflection, urges us always to be looking forward to the next sensation, rather than mulling over the import of what we have already seen or tasted. Christmas has come and gone, it tells us, and maybe it’s time to move on. And if Christmas were simply a matter of the ephemera – of mince pies and tinsel and a sense of anticipation – it probably would be. Some things don’t keep, after all, and even the most festive of spirits can outstay its welcome. But the substance of this season is something far too weighty to be dealt with and dismissed so quickly. There is far more meat on the bone – or far more plums in the pudding – than we can possibly do justice to in a day.

Whatever meaning we find in Christmas – as a festival of life and community in the dark days of winter or as a commemoration of the dawn of ‘the Light of the World’ – today is not the day to demand something new. We have to look forward, of course – yet not to the next fixture, still less the next acquisition, but to the continuing living-out of the implications of yesterday’s celebrations.

© The Independent 2000


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