Life and Work, December 2002
One of the most pleasurable radio programmes I ever took part in was broadcast around Christmas twenty years ago. Called "What day's Christmas Anyway?" it was chaired by Magnus Magnusson who had been provided with a table, three easy chairs, a bottle of wine and three glasses and while the wine was enjoyed, Magnus asked me and the church historian Professor Willie Friend to reflect on what about Christmas we could be certain of, and what was myth and legend.
I tend not to agree with those who believe that 25th December was settled on as the date of Christmas so that a Christian festival could be bolted on to a pagan winter solstice celebration. I believe that Christmas is on December 25th because that is exactly nine months after March 25th, and we can be reasonably certain that Jesus was crucified on a date which we now call March 25th. Some churches mark March 25th as the day when Gabriel announced to Mary that she was expecting a child which was born nine months later. Therefore the life of Jesus from conception to death was a perfect number of years.
It is ironic that the event whose date we can pinpoint with some accuracy and the details of which are well established, Good Friday, is the event which is not fixed in the calendar, whereas the event whose date we do not know and whose details owe more to creative theological embroidery than hard fact is the one which is marked on a firm date, December 25th!
I must confess that within family and among friends I am known as someone who on Christmas Eve makes Ebenezer Scrooge seem positively enthusiastic about the celebration of the nativity. In the half hour or so before a Watchnight Service, in the days when I was a parish minister, people learned to avoid giving me any cheery greetings or effusive good wishes, because they soon discovered that I rather resented the fact that they had, shall we say sometimes dined well, while I was strictly on short rations awaiting a service which always had something of an element of surprise about it.
I remember one Watchnight Service when I was a young assistant minister in St Giles' Cathedral, when an elder afterwards told us how he had handed the offering back to the first seat in a crowded row, and somehow it never emerged from the other end!
In my first parish in Glasgow I tried to create an atmosphere building up to midnight, and so for the duration of the short address and the prayer which led up to Easter all the lights were turned off except the lights on the tall tree and the one which illuminated the pulpit lectern. One year I was aware of a certain light-heartedness amongst the unaccustomed worshippers. At first I assumed that some double entendre had perhaps escaped my censoring revision of the sermon but I could think of none. I wasn't saying anything intentionally humorous and I couldn't spot anything that might have been unintentionally humorous. After the service I said to the session clerk, a wonderfully mischievous man that I thought there was a certain restlessness in the congregation. "Didn't you realise what was happening? The organist sitting behind you was silhouetted on the wall in the light from the pulpit, and so while you were talking all we could see was this big black head, scratching his nose all the time!"
A minister I know used to be so incensed that people who wouldn't darken a church door at any other time turned out for the Watchnight Service, and he used to enjoy each year pointing out that most of the story was a mixture of myth, legend and creative theological story-telling, and he used to berate me for not doing the same, though I agreed with his assessment of the Christmas narrative. But then, if it is a good myth, what you do on Christmas Eve is revel in it, enjoy it to the full, let it work its power on you. Later on it can be explored and analysed.
And when I got back home, happy that it was over for another year, and all the irritability gone, I used to reflect that there was something quite appropriate about people who were not regularly religious welcoming Christmas. The story says these are exactly the people God came amongst.
Oh, and by the way, to use the word "myth" does not mean it isn't true!