I stayed up to watch it one year – not because I’m a telly addict but because I was so angry with my husband that night I couldn’t sleep. So I followed Comic Relief through the whole night. In the course of it – I may not have got this word-for-word right because I’m talking about fifteen years ago – I vividly remember Lenny Henry among children in African poverty, saying: ‘If this was your neighbour on your doorstep, you’d help them – well, this is your neighbour, your doorstep.’ His words made a profound impact on me.
A few years ago, a lady from what was then the Badger’s church gave up her Christmas with her husband and young children to travel to Romania to help in an orphanage. A lot more years ago, I remember the Plain community near us, for the sake of simplicity more than anything else I think, deciding they would stop giving each other Christmas gifts.
These all came back to mind when I came across a website recently of a Christian sister talking about how her family (I think she has young children) celebrate Christmas without gifts. They celebrate it as Jesus’ birthday, giving gifts to those who represent him – the poor, the lonely, the destitute, but not each other. They dress up for a nativity, they go for walks in the country, they eat birthday food, just no gifts.
The website include a link to an embedded video, and a plea to watch it, so I did. It was a preacher talking about Liberia, where he had just been. He had seen people in serious poverty, and a deep impact had been made on him by a four-year-old boy he had seen by the roadside – because he had a four-year-old son himself. To cut to the chase, the message was that if this had been his son lost and alone in Liberia, he’d have moved heaven and earth to get him rescued, and God was telling us ‘this is my son – please go and help him, please go and find him and bring him home.’ Gulp. Liberia, eh? That’s a long way off. All of them? How?
Are you feeling guilty, yet?
I respect the viewpoints of the people I have described here, but I am not entirely convinced, and not wholly certain I admire them.
For one thing, it is not the adults who are deprived by giving up Christmas celebrations and gifts. The wonder and the excitement is the children’s. And our families, especially our children, are our responsibility.
The lady who went to Romania did a wonderful thing, but I wondered about her husband, left to sort out the Christmas dinner, and her children having Christmas without Mummy. Knowing their church, they were probably taken in by another family and had a fantastic time themselves. Even so. Christmas is not a great time for the mother of a young family to be away from home. You make a choice, don’t you, when you bring a child into the world. You make a commitment. I think it’s wonderful that a church should send people to help out in a Romanian orphanage – maybe the young, single adults, or the active early retired people whose children are grown. But (okay I know it’s old-fashioned) I do think a mother’s place is with her family. In general, I mean: maybe the Lord specially called that young mother that year.
And the community who gave up the luxury of Christmas gifts. I wondered if there might not have been a way to move into a deeper expression of simplicity that affected the adults more and not so much the children - perhaps cutting back on their levels of international travel in keeping community links? Or maybe they addressed that as well, and I just didn't know. I guess they were looking for something that would involve the whole community; but going without Christmas presents seemed to me like something that the adults would find easy and the children would find really disappointing and painful. I think it would have hurt me very much to do that to my choldren though, so maybe it is painful to the adults as well - not for themselves but for their children. It's one to think about.
Lenny Henry? We did sponsor the education of children overseas and give to Comic relief and other charities of course – but actually it was not my neighbour and my doorstep (though I saw what he meant) because if it had been, I would have approached it differently. You see, we didn’t have much money ourselves. Our budget never did work on paper. We ourselves relied on the kindness of others to get through – the harvest parcels from the church, our generous parents who gave occasional gifts of money or helped with car bills and brought bags of groceries. Our survival was structured around random acts of kindness! But if that destitute child had lived near us, he could have come on board. The loaf would have broken into eight as easy as seven.
Actually this brings back a sudden memory of taking our family to an open day at a special international school near us one summer. It was billed as free entry, so we could go. But when we got there, men with collecting boxes were shaking them under our noses at the gate. Under pressure of the anxiety of surviving, I made a fool of myself by saying to them: ‘But you said it was free! That’s why we came! I’ve hardly got the money for a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk for my kids this weekend! You said it was free!’ Ghastly memory.
Anyway – Liberia. OK. This preacher wants me to go to Liberia and bring all the destitute kids by the roadside home. Wha-a-a?
Now, here’s the thing. Christmas, to me, is a holy day. I love the candles, the carols, the arrival of the infant light, so vulnerable and tender in a cold, dark world. I love the mystery, the poignant meeting of humanity with divinity. It moves me. It speaks to me. But the tinsel and the presents? I don’t give a stuff. I don’t care a bit if my friends send me a card or not. I’m not counting, I don’t notice. It’s the relationship I care about, not the gift, not the card. It’s like I have no photos of my family anywhere in my home. I don’t need to. They are always in my heart.
But my family does care about Christmas, and I have a responsibility to them. It is not my opinion only that counts.
I can scale down the gifts, give only a small home-made thing to my daughters, my husband. But what about the others? If I gave a small home-made thing to my mother, she’d feel seriously hurt, that she’d been slighted. Because she doesn’t see life as I do. And my American son-in-law: I want to give him something that is of meaning and will bring delight to him – nothing lavish, nothing big, but definitely something to let him know he is loved and understood. Something that says to him: ‘You left your home and your family and gave up your whole life to come here and make your home with us because you love my daughter and she would not want to be parted from her family. So here is something that shows I have noticed your tastes, your favourite things, your personality – here is a gift not just generic and “suitable”, but especially for you.’
Now maybe I don’t always get it right and his wife takes it straight down to the charity shop the day after Boxing Day – but that’s my intention.
Liberia. I can pray for Liberia. On an occasional basis I might send some money to Liberia. I’m not sure I can fix whatever’s happening there that leaves a four-year-old by the roadside with nobody scooping him up and taking him home in the first place. I have read there are a great many AIDS orphans in Africa, and I know AIDS is more easily contained where men will live faithfully with their wives and be content with one sexual partner. I have heard that money sent to Africa does not always reach its destination, and I have seen pictures of Robert Mugabe’s home on the internet and heard about the lavish lifestyles of some African leaders. I understand the problems are complex in these matters, but I’m not sure I have any solutions. I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to fly out and help or bring back even one orphan let alone a whole lot of them. Does that mean I don;t care about them, even though I feel so terribly guilty? I'm not sure.
But as well as Liberia I would like to support the Woodland Trust that protects the trees, the lungs of the earth, from the steady advance of concrete. I would like to give towards the upkeep of the Quaker Meeting House where I worship. I’d like to send some money sometimes to the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture, because I regard torture as the darkest evil on this earth. And to the NSPCC. And the wonderful work of the MRDF among the world's poorest people. And to the Musicians Benevolent Fund, because many members of my family are musicians. And to Surviving Christmas for the destitute people in our town. And to helping out when members of my family run into trouble.
So I find myself left with a dilemma, with a terrible battle of conscience raging in my heart. What will bring me peace? This is what I will do – this is what I do every year.
I will celebrate Christmas. This is the feast that honours Jesus, our Emmanuel, entrusting himself to us in the humility and simplicity of the stable at Bethelehem. How could I not celebrate that? 'Silent night, holy night… Christ the Redeemer is here.'
I will hang on strings the cards friends who love me have sent, and those will be my decorations. I will send cards to people who need to know I care about them and would feel hurt if I forgot them – especially to family who are far away and to friends who are old or lonely and will have few cards to put on show in their homes. And all the cards I buy will be those that support charities, and I will be careful in my choice of the charity as well as the choice of cards. I do not, for example, support charities that fund vivisection.
We will have a meal together on Christmas Day. Any family members who would like to eat with us can come. It will be an ordinary meal, such as we might have any day of the week, nothing extra, but with an emphasis on traditional, local, seasonal ingredients. We will lay the table with a cloth and candles, and that – along with the gathering – is what will make it special.
We will worship together. We will go for the Carol Sing at the Plain community. We will have an afternoon of carols in our home with my first husband (my children’s father) and his wife and his frail, elderly parents, and we will go to the Carols by Candlelight he has organized at a nearby church on the following day. We will take little Mikey to the Living Crib service at Badger’s church on Christmas Eve, and if we can stay awake we will go to Midnight Mass there as well on Christmas Night. When I was a care assistant I worked in the nursing home opposite that church, and it meant the world to me working on night duty, to hear the bell rung for the Eucharist on Christmas night. I couldn’t go, but they were with me. On Christmas Day this year we have invited the Quakers to come and sing carols and have a short Meeting for Worship in our home on Christmas morning – save them opening up the Meeting House for the few that want to gather.
And we will give gifts. My budget is small, but I have bought one or two gifts for my immediate family and for a couple of friends who have no family. I buy local handmade, or fair-trade, or things that support either charities or small local firms and craftsmen. Or I make my own. None of us earns very much, so Hebe and Alice and I plan to make a little box of gifts for each family member, to give from the household rather than from us as individuals – it cuts down on the purchasing and stops it being a kind of present orgy, but still means each person feels cherished and remembered. So we have four households here – ours, Rosie and Jon’s, Grace and Clay and Mikey’s and Grandmary’s. All of us will spend time together, and each household will bring a small gift or two to each person.
It has crossed my mind before now to invite into our home the people we know who we think might be alone at Christmas, which I would be happy to do, but it would create difficulties within my family. We are all a bit anti-social and don’t really do socializing, ever. When I have floated the idea it has not been well received. We are quiet and rather reclusive people. I did have a party on my birthday this year, but it was an afternoon of silence, with worship at the end. Spending Christmas alone is not something that would trouble me, but I would find it both alarming and difficult to be incorporated into someone else’s family Christmas. And if I were living alone, I'd run and hide if I saw a group of people I didn't know very well, coming to visit me uninvited on Christmas Day - especially if, not knowing about my food allergies, they'd kindly brought me gifts of good things to eat when I had no companions to secretly feed them to having tactfully accepted them. Knowing this of myself, I find the idea of guests for Christmas very challenging. Looking after the family I already have, and to whom I owe hospitality, stretches me to the max already.
I wonder if there are other solutions to being alone at Christmas? Like my friend Shelagh who is a single lady and might have been alone at Christmas: only she wouldn’t be because she is a good friend to others and they would be glad to include her in their home;, and besides that, exactly because she lives alone and has no family responsibilities, she works as a volunteer at Surviving Christmas offering a festive lunch to the homeless and friendless. That seems like a really admirable approach – though I think it would be fine if she gave herself a break from it too, it shouldn't be something she feels she has to do. Or an elderly single Christian sister I knew who every year booked herself into a Christian holiday place for Christmas, to pre-empt an invitation from her nephew or niece, that she suspected would have been sent as a duty of kindness.
I have raised my children as they grew to live ethical lives, and this they do. In the way they live every day, they implement the ethical framework in which they have been raised. They surely care about others, and this is reflected in the daily minutiae of their lives. But they do have struggles in life, and materially they don’t have much. And at Christmas it matters to them – it really does, that we have just the family. So I honour that.
Liberia, I’m really, really sorry. I couldn’t stretch to bringing those little children home. My lonely neighbours, I'm so very sorry I'm not much help to you at Christmas either. But I haven’t forgotten you. And as far as I can, I shall not forget the lost children of Liberia, or the many lost and broken souls who huddle on doorsteps and shiver in England’s cold, either.
The Christmas dilemma is always with me. I write it down because I thought it might be your dilemma as well. It’s a difficult path to tread.