Will Christmas be cancelled?

Brian Sibley, author of Joseph and The Three Gifts, reflects on how even the events of the first Christmas were a source of disruption …

‘Will Christmas be cancelled?’ That’s the new fear. As the Covid pandemic continues to rampage across the world – a contemporary manifestation of those centuries-old terrors from the death-dealing dragons of legend to the unleashed horrors of the monster movie – the headline writers are shifting the focus for our anxiety from the personal to the communal, identifying the threat as being not simply to the vulnerabilities of individuals but to a concept – as invisible as the virus itself – which, in some measure, we all buy into: Christmas.

At its mildest, this new apprehension is recognition of the fact that Christmas 2020 won’t be ‘normal’, won’t be ‘like it should be’. But, then, what ‘should’ Christmas be like? Is it simply an emotional, nebulous concept owing its potency to the romantic imagination of Charles Dickens and Norman Rockwell, to the snow-and-holly imagery of the Christmas card and the cosy, fireside-snuggling lyrics of the seasonal songbook? 

And, if we are honest, how many of our Christmases have been what they ‘ought’ to have been, or even what we hoped they might be? How many, down the years, have had their personal Christmas ‘cancelled’ by war, sickness, loss or separation? How often have even the most perfectly planned (and purchased) festive gatherings been marred by sudden tragedy or petty squabble? And let’s not forget that anxiety and stress about Christmas celebrations are a strictly First World problem and one that, in truth, is no further from your doorstep than the rough sleeper huddled in the doorway of your local, socially-distancing (but still seasonally bedecked) supermarket.

At best, for most of us, Christmas 2020 will be ‘disrupted’. But it is worth remembering that the events of the first Christmas were also a source of disruption – trivial or transformative – in the lives of every person in that tale we know so well. It was the case for the thousands of families forced to travel many miles to meet the demands of a foreign bureaucracy, just as it was for the minor Roman officials coping with the hassles of a difficult job in an alien land.  

And, among the crowd that thronged the narrow streets of that ‘little town of Bethlehem’, there were the momentously disrupted lives of a young woman given the unsought, but gladly undertaken, task of motherhood, and the faithful man upon whom was laid the burden of caring for her and desperately seeking a safe place for the child to be born.

There was upheaval, too, in the lives of others: the inn-keeper given the choice between turning away unwanted visitors or the less convenient option of offering compassion and humble hospitality; the shepherds, their honest, simple understanding of their sheepfold-narrow world turned upside-down by dazzling visions way beyond their ken; and the sages, those seers rich in wisdom, setting out on a transcendental quest in search of new learning at, as the poet noted, ‘just the worst time of the year for a journey’; or, even that unsympathetic figure, the terrified king, sleeplessly pacing the marble corridors of his palace, angst-ridden by ancient prophecies that might portend his dethronement by a mere child.

To all of which must be added the astounding, over-arching, cosmic intervention by the Creator: reaching out through time and space and plunging His hand deep into the human-disordered turmoil of His world in order to change, forever, the very nature of the relationship between God and man.  

Indeed, the gospel that had its birth that night would become, by its unequivocal message, the single most revolutionary source of disruption across millennia: confronting, challenging and transforming societies, cultures and the destinies of individual lives without number.    

What then for us, in this year of our Lord 2020? Will Covid, like the mean-spirited Grinch, steal Christmas? Inevitably and indiscriminately, this Christmas will find each of us where and how we are: rich or poor, well or sick, happy or sad, with others or alone.  

But then that is exactly how He who gave the day its holy name came into the world two thousand years ago and still comes to us anew – not just on December 25, but on any day, at any time, in any place. That was and remains the promise of Christmas and it is why Christmas cannot and will not ever be cancelled.

Brian Sibley is author of Joseph and The Three Gifts: An Angel’s Story, available now in hardback, priced £9.99. He dramatised the celebrated BBC radio adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, and is the author of many books on fantasy films and literature, and biographies of C. S. Lewis (Shadowlands), the Rev. W. Awdry (The Thomas the Tank Engine Man) and legendary Tolkien filmmaker, Peter Jackson.