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The Days Beyond Recall
Are you old enough to remember the bad old days? Those days when we had to graft for a living instead of working a four and a half day week with a long weekend once a fortnight? The days when the Christmas break was all of two days long? The days when we had to work a night shift on Christmas Eve and then find that the buses had stopped running and we had to walk the eight miles home, through the snow? The days when we were allowed to live it up on New Year's Eve as long as we were back at work by six o'clock on New Year's morning? They don't know they're born nowadays!
In this day and age the Christmas break is longer than Wakes Week. Except, of course, for the nurses, who have to deal with casualties from flying champagne corks, the poor harassed shopworkers, who have to cope with the melee at the sales, and taxi drivers, endlessly mopping vomit from the back seats of their cabs. What about the clergy? Notwithstanding the fact that there is always some nutter who risks instant death by asking us if we are going away for Christmas, this is a holiday period. A change, they say, is as good as a rest.
It's a change to have the mass of the people actually interested in a religious festival. There's something about the celebration of Christmass which brings out a smidgen of dewy eyed sentimentality in even the most hardened cynic. The sight of mixed infants with tea-towels wrapped round their heads, singing a lullaby to a pot doll, is guaranteed to bring a tear to the eye. The Christ-child has a magical effect on us all.
But, I can hear the less wised-up ones among you muttering, what is this doing in January's magazine? This is the real Christmass. We look forward to the Feast of the Epiphany and the coming of the Magi (they weren't kings and S.Matthew's Gospel account doesn't say that there were three of them) to mark the beginning of the end of the festival, which can go right on until Candlemas. Those of us who observed Advent properly are now in the middle of an extended holy-day. The ones who jumped the gun will be in the throes of a massive dyspeptic anticlimax and it serves them right. Starting a new year in the middle of the celebration of the birth of Our Lord must be the best way of all.
God bless you all, Fr Allan.
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