Behold, it’s that time of year when there came wise men from the East. Well,
they were hoping to come but apparently all their flights have been
cancelled because of the fog. They’ve just been on the mobile and it’s chaos
at the airport.
“Still, look on the bright side,” they told the BBC’s reporter. “With all this
gold, frankincense and myrrh we can make a fortune on eBay.”
There is no doubt about it: Christmas has changed unrecognisably from its
humble origins. It’s complicated, fraught and, above all, a challenge.
Here are just some of the pitfalls you need to watch out for to make sure that
Christmas 2006 goes with a swing. (Not that you wanted a swing: you were
probably hoping for a bicycle.)
THE DRINKING
It’s not just Rudolph the reindeer who’ll have a shiny red nose this
Christmas. According to Mintel, the research company, the average reveller
will knock back 137 units of alcohol over the 12 days of the festive season
— the equivalent of 68 pints of beer or 15 bottles of wine.
That’s just more than six times the safe level for men and almost 10 times the
limit for women, and about half the amount that the average Church of
England bishop can tuck away after evensong.
The problem of Christmas drinking is now so bad that Cardiff Cathedral has
been forced to hold its midnight mass at 9pm. In previous years members of
the congregation were so drunk by midnight that they thought “bring me flesh
and bring me wine” from Good King Wenceslas was the call for last orders.
Police say the profile of the average drunkard moves distinctly upmarket in
the weeks before Christmas. “We often find men in crumpled suits sleeping
off excess booze on top of piles of bin bags or in skips and women in
cocktail dresses crumpled in doorways,” says Commander Chris Allison,
licensing spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers.
In fact, things have got so bad that the Red Cross is setting up M*A*S*H-style
field hospitals in town centres. At a centre in Brighton, door staff will be
on duty between 10pm and 3am to direct the tottering wounded to an area
where they can sober up, throw up or be treated for minor injuries. Youth
workers will also be available to provide information on safe sex. There’s
goodwill for you.
THE EATING
Once we have sobered up for Christmas Day, we will no doubt be feeling
peckish. Just as well. According to the British Dietetic Association, we
will work our way through 6,000 calories on Christmas Day alone — three
times the recommended amount. More brandy butter, anybody? Or another
helping of turkey? We now devour 10m turkeys each Christmas, although once
we used to favour bustard, goose and cockerel (peacock and swan for smart
folk). The man to blame for turkey is William Strickland, who introduced the
bird to the British Isles in 1526. He had half a dozen to shift after
picking them up at a good price from traders in America.
As you shovel it all down, you might reflect that the death rate at this time
of year is 30% higher than it is in summer. Your good health!
THE PARTIES
As if Christmas parties didn’t offer enough embarrassing pitfalls, here’s
another: your drunken antics can now be caught on camera and posted on the
internet. The number of such videos has tripled this year to 150,000,
according to ViralVideoChart.com, the web company.
One of the most popular videos shows a drunken woman ranting to the camera
about her boss, only to discover he is standing behind her. In another, a
drunken man vomits into his pint glass and then drinks it again. At one
point, he dips his finger into the glass to give the contents a stir.
IT’S WHAT I ALWAYS WANTED
If you wish to be showered with expensive gifts, move to the northeast of
England. People there spend an average of £54 per present. And steer clear
of the stingy southwest, where they spend just £36.
Those figures come from a survey by Parship, a dating agency which says that
we will spend an average of £617 on presents. Deloitte, the consultancy
firm, also did research, but obviously interviewed a more stingy
cross-section of society — who will be spending an average of £378 per
person (and that’s after an increase of 22% on last year).
Let’s not stoop to stereotyping anybody here, but it seems that the careful
folk of Yorkshire will spend the least overall — £330.
If you are racking your brains to find a present for that difficult teenager,
don’t bother — they want a mobile phone. And if they’ve already got one,
they want a better one. Preferably with a built-in digital television,
internet access and a special infrared device for tidying bedrooms.
In a survey, three-quarters of young people between 16 and 24 said that mobile
phones make good presents. When questioned further, the other 25% shrugged
their shoulders and said, “Yeah, anything, whatever.”
THE TREE
Between 7m-8m trees will now be dropping pine needles onto the nation’s
carpets. If all these trees grew together, they would cover 10 square miles.
There has been a slight tree shortage this year after a fall in imports from
Denmark, where production is down after a cut in EU subsidies.
The Christmas tree was not, as popularly believed, brought to this country by
Prince Albert: it was introduced to this country in the Georgian period.
Queen Charlotte, the German wife of George III, decorated a tree for her
family in the 1790s. But Albert did popularise the tradition when the tree
at Windsor Castle was photographed for the Illustrated London News in 1848.
Victorian trees were generally displayed on tables in pots, with gifts placed
unwrapped underneath. It was not until the larger Norway spruce became
popular in the 1880s that trees were placed on the floor.
CARDS
Do your wrists ache after writing scores of Christmas cards? Blame Sir Henry
Cole, a civil servant who in 1843 wanted to wriggle out of writing his round
of seasonal letters and so asked a friend John Horsley, an artist, to design
1,000 hand-coloured lithographs with the message “A Merry Christmas and a
Happy New Year to you”.
This year the Post Office is expected to deliver about one billion cards.
GOING TO CHURCH
It goes without saying that the pews will be packed at Southwark cathedral
this year, where Bishop Tom Butler has become something of a reluctant
celebrity for his antics following a party at the Irish embassy. (Asked what
he was doing throwing soft toys around in the back of a stranger’s Mercedes,
he replied, “I’m the bishop of Southwark, it’s what I do.”) The signs are
that other churches will also do good business. Figures just released by the
Church of England show a 6% increase in attendance at services last year —
the Christmas congregation was 2.6m. Attendance at cathedral services has
gone up by nearly one-third since 2000.
That’s the good news. The bad news comes from those pesky Methodists.
According to a survey in the Methodist Recorder, about 43% of people say
they went to church last Christmas — but attendance for the Church of
England amounts to just 6%.
Have all these worshippers been paying attention? Possibly not. A BBC survey
has discovered that just 44% of children — aged between seven and 11 — know
that Christmas celebrates the birth of Christ. The other 56% probably think
it marks the birth of a new PlayStation.
SORRY, BUT THERE IS NO ESCAPE
Want to get away from it all? Tough. People have tried and failed before.
A Puritan pamphleteer called Philip Stubbes looked around him in 1583 and was
furious to see that Christmas revellers were enjoying themselves. “What
dicing and carding, what eating and drinking, what banqueting and feasting
is then used,” he complained.
By the 1640s Puritans had seized power and moved to ban Christmas, a ban that
lasted until the Restoration in 1660. Parliament issued the Directory for
the Publick Worship of God, which not only banned all holy days, including
Christmas, but ordered that psalms be sung in tune. Even at home.
Members of the English parliament led by example: they spent Christmas Day of
1647 issuing fines to members of the gentry who had supported the king.
Elsewhere the ban was deeply unpopular. Rioters took control of Canterbury,
shouted royalist slogans and put holly wreaths on their doors — surely one
of the few occasions when putting up Christmas decorations was a
revolutionary act.
Merry Christmas.
Faith is staging a fight-back
Amid criticism that Christmas is nothing more than an alcohol-fuelled
celebration of shopping, church leaders have been speaking out about faith
and the Christian spirit alive at this time of year
The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams asked for people
around the world to remember Christians in the Middle East. During a
pilgrimage to Bethlehem with other English church leaders he said: “This
Christmas, pray for the little town of Bethlehem, and spare a thought for
those who have been put so much at risk by our short-sightedness and
ignorance; and ask what you might do locally to raise the profile of these
brave and ancient churches.
He continued: “In this so troubled, complex land . . . justice and security is
never something which one person claims at the expense of another or one
community at the expense of another. We are here to say that security for
one is security for all. For one to live under threat, whether of occupation
or of terror, is a problem for all, and a pain for all.”
The Archbishop of York John Sentamu spoke of how people are
returning to the Christian church: “Something is bringing people back into
church and I have a great hope it’s because people are beginning to look
past the commercial messages of Christmas.
“After decades of being bombarded with messages telling us that the way to
have a really happy Christmas is to buy lots of things we don’t really need,
eat lots of things that aren’t really that good for us and drink even more,
people can see that this doesn’t bring happiness of a lasting kind.”
The Pope spoke of the need for God to be at the forefront of
people’s minds. He said that 2006 would be remembered for “the horrors of
war near the Holy Land and in general the risk of a clash between cultures
and religions”.
He said that risk was “hovering dangerously” over the world. A secularised
society that based its decisions too much on reason and logic, he said, left
no room for faith and is therefore “not capable of entering in a true
dialogue with religions”.
He continued: “If it remains closed to questions relating to God, this will
end up leading to a clash of cultures.”
