I hope all readers are enjoying a very merry Christmas!
Year after year I find my treasuring of Christmastide undiminished. In this season we really are breathing different air. Things quieten down; the music in the shops grows merrier and less aggressive, and the world becomes gentler and quieter. Once the moment arrives, even the forces of commerce cannot touch us. Britain returns to the common observance of a festival of light and sweetness. The mainstream feels a little more like home, the great cultural headwind abates slightly, and, more importantly, there is good will and merriment about, and hearts are softened to peace and goodwill. The season gives us an excuse to wish each other well, to mend differences, to make amends.
Year after year I find my treasuring of Christmastide undiminished. In this season we really are breathing different air. Things quieten down; the music in the shops grows merrier and less aggressive, and the world becomes gentler and quieter. Once the moment arrives, even the forces of commerce cannot touch us. Britain returns to the common observance of a festival of light and sweetness. The mainstream feels a little more like home, the great cultural headwind abates slightly, and, more importantly, there is good will and merriment about, and hearts are softened to peace and goodwill. The season gives us an excuse to wish each other well, to mend differences, to make amends.
Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh has a good article here (published in the Irish magazine The Burkean), observing that the modern world, at Christmas, when it thinks nobody is looking, 'indulges in a celebration of everything it usually disdains: family, nostalgia, tradition, sentimentality, innocence, festivity, ceremony, and even (albeit usually indirectly) religion'. And why not? These are natural things, and we mere mortals can only pretend to be cynical and individualistic for so long. There was a time, not so long ago, when this sweet sensation of high day and holiday, that heady feeling of living in time outside time, came round several times a year: now only the one 'festive period' is left to us. But even a single chink of light in the year is better than none. It is better than nothing even if the world only half-remembers that the Creator of all things has taken flesh, lived in the knowledge of our frailty, brought forth warmth into the cold world, and thereby changed the very fabric of the universe, and changed it utterly. That is no longer a void between our lonely souls, but Love.
Here is an exuberant setting by the Welsh composer William Mathias (1934-1992) of the fifteenth-century English carol 'A babe is born all of a maid', one of several preserved in the famous medieval Sloane manuscript 2593 (catalogue record here). Eleanor Parker writes more about it on her wonderful 'Clerk of Oxford' blog: https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2012/01/babe-is-born-all-of-may.html. The choir of King's College, Cambridge, is led by the Director of Music, the late Sir Stephen Cleobury (who died on St Cecilia's day last year; a great loss to the world of music).
Thanks for linking to my article!
ReplyDeleteParts of it heavily resemble a blog post you wrote last Christmas, although I hope that's a meeting of minds rather than plagiarism on my part!
You're welcome! I know the blog you mean, but it's a meeting of minds, surely. It's the idea that matters, and I know we seem to think along very similar lines anyway. Happy New Year!
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