A Christmas You Can Believe In

 Broadcaster, award-winning writer, and author of Joseph and The Three Gifts, Brian Sibley reflects …

A leading supermarket has taken, as its seasonal promotional message, the slogan, “A Christmas You Can Believe In” which, necessarily, begs the question what sort of Christmas could you NOT believe in?

Perhaps, in these Covid days – when the desire to celebrate Christmas may be dulled by fear of infection or muted by bereavement or be financially impossible – it is difficult to believe in the validity of the hedonistic orgy of consumerism that, with all its brash and gaudy trappings and trimmings, regularly attends the closing months of our year. 

Or it might be that the long-growing, ever-mounting fever for an annual Spend-a-thon that characterises Christmas in the Twenty-first Century has, in turn, rendered unbelievable that far older tradition of a Christmas primarily centered on family, friendship and principles of goodwill and generosity toward the wider fellowship of mankind that was so romantically (and sentimentally) espoused by Charles Dickens in his writings and visualised by generations of popular artists, from the illustrators of Christmas cards to a legion of movie-makers.

But stepping back from those predictable tropes, something that the Covid pause-button has gifted us, what are we to make of that FIRST Christmas and those featured in the ageless story of a mid-winter birth? Was that – is that – a Christmas you can believe in? 

Of course, when we speak about the ‘First Christmas’, no one involved in the events that we now memorialise each December knew that they were part of the First Christmas (that would only become a fully developed concept many years later); yet every player in that drama was called upon to have, in some measure or other, belief.

The demands made on them by that call to believe were various: a moment of astonishing wonder for the shepherds, called to witness the birth of a stranger’s child in a town crowded with strangers, a bizarre interruption in their tedious nightly routine; and a more protracted and wearisome demand on the sustained credulity of those other witnesses, the Wise Men, enduring what must have been (whatever their starting point) a long and arduous journey. 

It was, however, belief of the most demanding kind for the young woman and the older man into whose care the Creator committed his self-created childlike form: a belief requiring not just, as in the case of sage and shepherd, a significant call to act, but one that demanded the acceptance and sustained commitment of guardianship. 

It could be argued that a present-day belief in the Christmas story and everything it symbolises is reinforced by two millennia of tradition – and of witnesses to that tradition – but it is a belief that may equally be challenged by the lengthy catalogue of doubts and objections held by a centuries-long roll call of disbelievers. We are, therefore, in much the same place as those very first ‘Christmassers’ who would all have been as open to doubt and fear as anyone today: the fiancé who had had already had to cope with accepting, not discreetly ending, an embarrassing engagement; the elderly seer for whom a portentous quest ended with the seemingly inexplicable concept of a king birthed in a stable-yard; the weary shepherd for whom a crackbrain, night-time trek to see a newborn baby could so easily have been just too big an ask. 

And, above all, the mother, unprepared in any sense – other than for her astonishing belief in the otherwise unbelievable – to bring into the world and to love and nurture a child who was none other than her own Creator.  

No one, certainly not even the most super-supermarket or its advertising agency, has ever said that it is easy to find and hold to that slogan for our times: ‘A Christmas You Can Believe In’; but, in every journey of faith, ‘belief’ is just the first of many, often countless, steps and if the next, or the next, or the one after that is a challenge greater than seemed possible at the outset of the journey, then we can always make our prayer that of the man who, years after the Bethlehem birth, implored the Christmas babe now grown to manhood: “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” 

Brian Sibley is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. 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.

Joseph and The Three Gifts: An Angel’s Story is available now in illustrated hardback for just £9.99.