Читать книгу The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas - Ariane Sherine - Страница 8

I’ve always been enthralled by Christmas. The English ideal, at any rate (where I come from in Scotland, Hogmanay was always the crowd-puller). The crackling snow, the animals lying down in their stalls silently at midnight in homage to the infant king; and, particularly, the glorious carolling heritage (my favourite is the rarely sung Nurse’s Carol, joining the choir being the sole highpoint of a miserable year long ago working in a hospital):

As the evening draws on

And dark shadows alight

With slow-breathing ox-en

To warm him all ni-i-ght

The prince of compassion

Concealed in a byre

Watches the rafters above him

RESPLENDENT WITH FIRE.

Good King Wenceslas, with his foreign fountains and strange ways, was as mystical to me as anything in Narnia; likewise the three kings, whose sonorous names and inexplicable gifts—

Myrrh have I

Its bitter perfume

Breathes a life

Of gathering gloom

Sorrowing, sighing

Bleeding, dying

Sealed in the stone cold tomb.

—gave me strange, excited thrills.

In my teens, I dressed up as a Victorian wench and took part in carol-singing tableaux at the local castle; the same one where, years later, I would get married—at Christmas time, the pillars swathed in holly and ivy. (Incidentally, if you’re having a secular service and aren’t allowed to mention the word God, I can save you some time and effort and inform you that the only carol that legally passes muster for a non-religious Christmas wedding is ‘Deck the Halls’.)

One of the great joys of having your own children, of course, is sharing Christmas with them. My husband, a Kiwi, spent all his childhood Christmases barbecuing on the beach and is entirely unfussed by the whole affair, but I had such wonderful Christmases that I want to make it as special as I can. Still, how to do that without fundamentally accusing their teachers of lying—or, in fact, lying?

And it is, after all, one of the greatest stories ever told—the little baby born in a manger, far from home. It has intrigue, small children (drummer boys are particularly popular in my house), stars, angels, various animals and getting to sleep outdoors—all catnip to littlies.

But, as that wonderfully conflicted cove John Betjeman put it:

…is it true? For if it is…

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare—

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine.

Because, of course, accepting the Christmas story means accepting a whole bunch of other stuff; doctrine perhaps not quite so tea-towel—and stuffed-lamb-friendly. And now my three-year-old is at pre-school—a Catholic pre-school, no less, it being our local—of course, the questions have begun.

‘Are you having the Baby Jesus?’ he says, prodding my large pregnant stomach.

‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s been done.’

‘Oh. Are you having a monkey?’

‘I hope not.’

I find him in the bedroom with the lovely nativity book his devout—and devoted—granny has sent him, even though he hasn’t been baptised and thus is slightly damned and stuff, arguing with his friend Freya.

‘Those are the three kings,’ he says solemnly.

‘NO! They’re the three wise men!’ said Freya, in a tone that brooks no argument.

‘NO! They are KINGS!’

‘WISE MEN!’

‘KINGS!’

‘MUM!!! FREYA SAYS SHE KNOWS MY STORY BUT IT IS MY STORY!!!’

‘IT IS MY STORY!’

‘It is,’ I say, ‘everyone’s story. It is one of the most famous stories ever told. Nearly everyone you will ever meet will know a little bit about this story.’

Wallace thinks about this for a bit.

‘No. It is just mine. Grandma sent it to me.’

Sometimes I feel like Charlotte in Sex and the City, having one last Christmas tree before she gives it all up for Judaism.

I take the boys to Christmas-morning mass—where my mother is playing the organ—but they don’t know when to sit or stand, or what to do, and I am unaccountably nostalgic for a life I never wanted.

Christmas, as a practising Catholic child, was seen as a reward for lots and lots and lots of church. We were constantly told that Easter was the more important festival, but Easter is relatively speaking, RUBBISH. Yes, there’s a chocolate egg, but six weeks of no sweets plus Stations of the Cross on Wednesdays, Good Friday mass, confession and the Saturday vigil (HOURS long)—the trade-off is, frankly, just not worth it. Though the palms on Palm Sunday are quite good.

Christmas, on the other hand, is just normal amounts of church (except, alas, that totally gruesome year it fell on a Saturday and we couldn’t believe we had to go again the next day), but also school parties, the Blue Peter advent ring, the calendar, going to Woolies to buy your mum a tiny bottle of Heather Spirit cologne (69p), and the glorious bellowing of ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’—a song more than a thousand years old—all serving merely to heighten the crazed, overwhelming anticipation that could only be sated by a pack of thirty felt-tip pens, graded by shade, yellow in the middle, and getting to eat lots of very small sausages.

But there is another story too, I know, to tell my little ones; perhaps not quite as immediate, but wonderful in its own way, and it starts:

‘In the northern parts of the world, the winters are long, and cold and dark, and people would get sad and miserable. So they have always in the very depths of winter, from the beginning of recorded time, celebrated light, and life, and the promise of renewal and new birth, just when they most needed cheering up.

‘And they would store food, and eat, and drink and be merry. And, in time, different cultures and creeds passed over the world, and changed and added to the stories about why we were celebrating, and said that perhaps we were celebrating because of a green man, or Mithras, or Sol, or that the Baby Jesus was being born, or because Santa Claus is flying over the world—look here, NASA even tracks him by satellite (www.noradsanta.org).

‘And now, like all the millions of people who lived before us, we too use midwinter to see our family and exchange gifts, and feast and be merry and carry on traditions from our ancestors.’

And they will say, ‘Why?’

And I will say, ‘Because we love you.’

And I will wonder, as I often do, why we love our children—our own children, not a chimera wrapped in swaddling clothes and found in a manger—so very, very much, and wishing, as atheists, that there were slightly more reassuring, less genetic, cold scientific reasons that we could give for why this is so.

And then I will probably just say, ‘Shall we sing “Little Donkey” again?’, knowing that they will immediately rush off to fetch their sweet Christmas bells.