Waking up to Christmas

This year’s John Lewis Christmas ad is a no-expense-spared animation starring The bear and the hare. Bear has always missed out on Christmas because the first snow-flakes of winter summon him to hibernation just as the forest animals are beginning to decorate their Christmas tree.

This year, however, it’s different. Bear’s devoted and ingenious friend Hare leaves a gift-wrapped parcel outside the cave where he’s sleeping. Its contents? An alarm clock set to go off on Christmas morning.

And so as the animals are excitedly opening their presents beneath a spectacular tree on the Big Day, bear appears, yawning on the sky-line, mesmerised by the wonder of it, his gift far more than what the parcel contained.

Of course it’s cute and heart-warming. But would I be a bah-humbug curmudgeon to point out that the film perpetuates the myth of Christmas as a season of perfection and total joy? It’s an illusion which makes most of us feel guilty at our less-than-perfect Christmases and additionally burdens with a sense of exclusion those whose lives are in crisis.

And we may well rage against John Lewis and the whole Christmas industry for perpetuating this cruel myth for commercial purposes, a myth which has no basis in the Christianity which gives Christmas its deepest significance.

The Christmas good news from a Christian perspective is certainly about joy and kindness to friend and stranger alike, but it is a joy found in the midst of, found despite pain and sorrow, and not an artificial joy which ignores reality.

The creators of the John Lewis ad describe the idea which inspired it. ‘We wondered what it would be like if you had never seen Christmas before.’ Many Christians have their stories of waking up to Christmas for the first time.

These stories will rarely involve coming across Christmas festivities for the first time, like bear; they may not even centre on carols and Nativity plays or midnight services. But each story will involve an awakening from what is seen in retrospect to be a long hibernation to an understanding that Christmas centres on the reality of God coming among us in Jesus. 

For God has not abandoned us. God draws alongside us in our pain and despair helping us bear our sorrows, bearing us through our sorrows. And such an awakening to this Christmas vision brings joy, or at least a whisper of joy whatever our circumstances because it gives not the illusion of an artificial reality, but a new view of reality.

The soundtrack to the John Lewis ad is a cover version by Lily Allen of the Keane song Somewhere only we know. It’s a poignant track, capable of many interpretations. Its themes include frailty – ‘I’m getting old…I’m getting tired’; a sense of loss – ‘Oh simple thing where have you gone?’; longing ‘ ‘I need somewhere to begin….I need something to rely on’; and a call to rendezvous ‘somewhere only we know.’

I suppose these words relate to the theme of the film insofar as the hare proves that his friendship can be relied on by the older animal, and the forest celebrations recall the lost simplicities of childhood Christmas. And could ‘somewhere only we know’ be an open secret, a John Lewis store?

But the lyric expresses a yearning at a much deeper level than is satisfied by Christmas schmaltz – a yearning for something to rely on, for a starting point at which to make a new beginning.

We can enjoy the film for what it is. But we don’t believe in magical forests where animals decorate trees and give presents and do creative stuff for other species. We view the world and the universe in purely scientific terms. There is wonder, but not enchantment.

Yet to waken up to Christmas in a Christian sense is to realise that we do live in an enchanted universe, a cosmos sustained by the enchantment of God’s presence, as though the whole creation were a designer garment proudly worn by its maker.

And the simple thing, which we all know instinctively we have lost, the simple thing which lies tantalisingly just over the boundary of our recall is the wonder that God loves us, that God is the one to rely on.

Lily Allen calls for a rendezvous ‘somewhere only we know.’ In one sense, the stories of our awakening to God take place in known places – a church, a carol service, the pages of a book or a Bible.  But with God it is personal. God comes to us knowing us as no-one else knows us and meets us in the deep, secret place where we are most truly ourselves.

Until then, as we sleep, the awakening gift is not far from us, waiting to be unwrapped.

 

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 28 November 2013)