Lockdown or no lockdown, it’s impossible to cancel Christmas by JOSEPH SHAW for Life Site News
To forbid children from seeing their grandparents and cousins, and to forbid parties and gatherings, is a blow struck, however inadvertently, against the cultural expression of the mystery of the Incarnation in the heart of every town and family.
Here in the UK we are getting used to headlines about Christmas being “cancelled.” These follow the plan that various earlier restrictions on ordinary life would “save” Christmas, a plan which has apparently failed. What the headline-writers have in mind is the customary celebration of Christmas.
We don’t do Thanksgiving here, so Christmas is a big deal in England. It is less so in Scotland, where after the Reformation the Calvinists didn’t celebrate it at all and people responded by making New Year (“Hogmanay”) into a secular festival of alcoholic over-indulgence. In England the Anglicans were somewhat more tolerant of vestiges of Catholic popular culture, and Queen Victoria’s spouse, Prince Albert, added a German element, making it what it is today: a festival of carols, Christmas trees, candles, family meals, Christmas pudding, “Father Christmas,” and present-giving.
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You don’t have to be a believing Christian to take part in this cultural phenomenon, but it is a cultural phenomenon built, not simply on a Christian festival, like having a long weekend and chocolate eggs at Easter, but on a Christian story. It is the Holy Family, in their journey to Bethlehem, in the birth of Jesus, and the visits of the shepherds and kings, who are at the heart of the commercialized indulgence, even if this heart is sometimes hidden. In our shopping streets they can be glimpsed in the music, the decorations, and the nativity scenes. In the most secular household they are still there too, in the idea of homecoming, family, and the exchange of gifts: and in the very idea of hope at the darkest time of the year. Without Christmas, the English winter would be nothing but dark, wet, and miserable.
