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Christmas comes but once a year...
For those of you who read this from afar off and don't know where we are, this parish lies between Scarborough and Filey, near the fault line that divides the North Riding from the East Riding of old Yorkshire. It is an area in a time warp. First, there is Filey, which is not so much reminiscent of the nineteenth century, it is still in the nineteenth century. It has small shops, real cute small shops with polite assistants. It has a band that plays to the holidaymakers, and children who paddle pleasantly in the summer sea. It is wonderful. At the other side there is Scarborough, which is still in the horse and carriage era. Not that there are any horses and carriages, it is just that the council have a policy of digging up all the approach routes so that the traffic travels at the same speed that a rather tired old nag would and the queue stretches back to Leeds, or on a Bank Holiday weekend to Huddersfield.
Because this anachronistic community still holds values that the big world outside have long since discarded we hold fast to traditions that have a meaning. Christmass does not end until Candlemas, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple and the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on 2 February. The cribs will be still there, in both our churches, as a reminder of that. In other places they probably threw the tree out and packed away the plaster figures as the Vicar went on holiday on Boxing Day. Here we maintain old ways of being church.
The antediluvian ceremony of Churching went out of the mainstream church when militant feminists came in. In this parish it still exists. Before we are besieged by big women of the church bearing placards and burning their foundation garments at our door, let me point out that Archbishop Cranmer's rather dour service has been replaced by one that acknowledges that men have some marginal part to play in the conception of a child. Now the father of the baby comes into it as well. We can gather together as a small group to thank God for the safe delivery of a child, to give the family a copy of one of the Gospels, and to talk about the meaning of baptism. Why is this? It is because, in this small corner of England at least, we have a long, long, time to contemplate a representation of the birthplace of Our Lord and to remember how important the Christ child, and all children, are to us.
May God bless you all, Fr Allan
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