Yes, indeed, Happy Christmas to one and all! I hope both readers are keeping a merry Feast.
What is it, I wonder, that Christmastide does to our sense of time? For time in these twelve days does not seem only linear and horizontal, as it does usually. There is a strange sensation that, as we pass through this diamond in the ring of the year, time is distorted and refracted so that ancient things feel much closer than normal. And there is that slanted sunlight, T.S. Eliot’s ‘midwinter spring’ and the ‘glare that is blindness in the early afternoon’, that shines as if out of the past. Peter Hitchens has written simply and beautifully here of ‘the feeling of the world holding its breath, the bells, the haunting light from the low sun, the sensation of the past being mixed up with the present’, whose effect he describes as being weaker now than in the ‘austere Protestant Britain’ of his youth.
To some extent this has to do, of course, with ringing the old year out and the new in. I think, however, that the mystery of time is bound up with the very heart of Christmas, rather than the New Year. Every year we churchgoers mark a chronological conundrum. The central and fathomless mystery is, of course, that God, who is timeless, made a direct intervention in human history, clambering through the narrow doors of time to live on earth beside us. Even as we consider this moment, though, we must look at once backwards and forwards. We cannot understand it fully without knowing that it had already been foretold by prophets; neither can we understand it without the Cross in the backs of our minds, as the gift of myrrh (for embalming) and several carols remind us. Nor can we contemplate Christmas without turning to the mystery of the future, towards which the whole faith points. So we look backwards to a past event, then we look both further backwards, then slightly forwards again, and finally turn right around in order to look forwards properly. Christmas is perfect, pluperfect, future in the past (if that is the right term) and future.
This sensation is so strong that it has survived, even if weakened as Peter Hitchens says, into the secular world. Is this not the only time of year when we leave our twenty-first century cynicism aside to take up old customs again without critiquing or scoffing, when we exchange cards depicting scenes of choristers and snowed-on English spires, when supermarkets play old-fashioned music in earnest, when, as Betjeman observed in a moment of dryness, ‘girls in slacks remember Dad / And oafish louts remember Mum’, or when we decorate our houses and wear party-hats without knowing why, except that an invisible but benevolent force obliges us to?
The more I look for evidence of this overlapping and mingling of time past and time to come with the present moment, the more I find. There is the famous example of Dickens’ three ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future in A Christmas Carol. It is in T.S. Eliot’s poem The Cultivation of Christmas Trees. His portrait of Christmas as seen by a child — a child
Thus Her Majesty draws our attention to two heirlooms which continue, almost miraculously it might seem, to bind us in 2015 to the Victorian age: the Christmas tree and her own British crown. Her words, which we are invited to bear in mind for the coming year, make the past feels much nearer and more familiar. (By the way, what presidential address could say anything like this?).
I can hear it too in this carol, the ‘other’ setting by Harold Darke of Rosetti’s carol In the Bleak Midwinter, which seems to be being sung longer ago than 2000, and further away than Cambridge…
What is it, I wonder, that Christmastide does to our sense of time? For time in these twelve days does not seem only linear and horizontal, as it does usually. There is a strange sensation that, as we pass through this diamond in the ring of the year, time is distorted and refracted so that ancient things feel much closer than normal. And there is that slanted sunlight, T.S. Eliot’s ‘midwinter spring’ and the ‘glare that is blindness in the early afternoon’, that shines as if out of the past. Peter Hitchens has written simply and beautifully here of ‘the feeling of the world holding its breath, the bells, the haunting light from the low sun, the sensation of the past being mixed up with the present’, whose effect he describes as being weaker now than in the ‘austere Protestant Britain’ of his youth.
To some extent this has to do, of course, with ringing the old year out and the new in. I think, however, that the mystery of time is bound up with the very heart of Christmas, rather than the New Year. Every year we churchgoers mark a chronological conundrum. The central and fathomless mystery is, of course, that God, who is timeless, made a direct intervention in human history, clambering through the narrow doors of time to live on earth beside us. Even as we consider this moment, though, we must look at once backwards and forwards. We cannot understand it fully without knowing that it had already been foretold by prophets; neither can we understand it without the Cross in the backs of our minds, as the gift of myrrh (for embalming) and several carols remind us. Nor can we contemplate Christmas without turning to the mystery of the future, towards which the whole faith points. So we look backwards to a past event, then we look both further backwards, then slightly forwards again, and finally turn right around in order to look forwards properly. Christmas is perfect, pluperfect, future in the past (if that is the right term) and future.
This sensation is so strong that it has survived, even if weakened as Peter Hitchens says, into the secular world. Is this not the only time of year when we leave our twenty-first century cynicism aside to take up old customs again without critiquing or scoffing, when we exchange cards depicting scenes of choristers and snowed-on English spires, when supermarkets play old-fashioned music in earnest, when, as Betjeman observed in a moment of dryness, ‘girls in slacks remember Dad / And oafish louts remember Mum’, or when we decorate our houses and wear party-hats without knowing why, except that an invisible but benevolent force obliges us to?
The more I look for evidence of this overlapping and mingling of time past and time to come with the present moment, the more I find. There is the famous example of Dickens’ three ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future in A Christmas Carol. It is in T.S. Eliot’s poem The Cultivation of Christmas Trees. His portrait of Christmas as seen by a child — a child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angeland who
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.
wonders at the Christmas Tree:— turns seamlessly to a contemplation of the eve of life, still hanging upon that line ‘Let him continue in the spirit of wonder,’
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext […]
So that the reverence and the gaietyAnd here it is in these words of the Queen during her Christmas address:
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure […]
So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By “eightieth” meaning whichever is last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.
At this time of year, few sights evoke more feelings of cheer and goodwill than the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree. The popularity of a tree at Christmas is due in part to my great-great grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. After this touching picture was published, many families wanted a Christmas tree of their own, and the custom soon spread.
Thus Her Majesty draws our attention to two heirlooms which continue, almost miraculously it might seem, to bind us in 2015 to the Victorian age: the Christmas tree and her own British crown. Her words, which we are invited to bear in mind for the coming year, make the past feels much nearer and more familiar. (By the way, what presidential address could say anything like this?).
I can hear it too in this carol, the ‘other’ setting by Harold Darke of Rosetti’s carol In the Bleak Midwinter, which seems to be being sung longer ago than 2000, and further away than Cambridge…
Perhaps we might expect to be frightened by this confusion of time. I feel only wonder and enchantment, and so I willingly answer the Queen’s invitation to be ‘grateful for all that brings light to our lives’, and echo her quotation from St John’s Gospel: ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’
