Unwrapping The Gift

A Christmas Story
By Ronnie Bray

Christmas when I was a boy was different, very different from what it is for me today.
Christmas in my childhood home was not at all a religious occasion, and yet there was always a
conspicuously changed atmosphere that pervaded the season as if it crept in unnoticed from a
mysterious place that kept it prisoner all year around, letting it run free for a short time to work
its special magic at Christmas.

As Christmastime draws near this year, the year of our Lord two thousand and seven, I feel to
contrast the Christmas experiences of other people and times with my own Christmases and
times.

Most will readily agree that Christmas is a time to be with family and loved ones. It is a hard
time to be alone, and when it is not possible to be in the midst of the ones we love and cherish,
then the soul thus deprived feels the pain of separation deeply. Charles Dickens wrote of an
enforced extended stay at an isolated inn, the Holly Tree, on the Yorkshire moors during one
Christmas, from where he had hoped after a single night’s stay to travel on and spend Christmas
in the rosy warmth of the good company of his friends.

“When I travel,” he wrote, “I never arrive at a place but what I immediately

want to go away from it. Before I had finished my supper of broiled fowl and
mulled port, I had impressed upon the waiter in detail my arrangements for
departure in the morning.

“Breakfast and bill at eight. Fly [which is a horse drawn carriage] at nine. Two
horses, or, if needed, even four.

“Tired though I was, the night appeared about a week long.

“In the morning I found that it was snowing still, that it had snowed all night, and
that I was snowed up. Nothing could get out of that spot on the moor, or could
come at it. When they might cut their way to the Holly-Tree, nobody could tell
me.

“It was now Christmas Eve. Still being snowed up was a thing I had not
bargained for. I felt very lonely.”

The Christmases of my childhood were largely confined within the isolating walls of my
Fitzwilliam Street home, but there were intimations that something momentous was taking place,
and that unnamed ‘something’ felt extremely virtuous. The atmosphere was transformed so that
even in the ever-present melancholy of wartime, the air about us seemed changed, and people
were more open, unselfish, and good-natured than they usually were. A chattering kindness
infused social transactions that was not present at other times of the year. And it was good –
very good!

When I was a boy, there were very few motor cars in my town, but it was remarkable to see their
drivers stop in Christmas weather to give lifts to total strangers to whom they had not been
properly introduced! A few days earlier those same drivers would not have spoken to or had any
regard for those they now so generously assisted under the influence of the Spirit of Christmas.

The rich became passing kind to the poor, and even those entrenched at opposite ends of the
political spectrum saluted each other as if they had been long lost brothers.

Ill-natured people who were uncomfortable in the presence of children, patted tiny pixie-hooded
heads and smiled mendaciously as their troubled consciences robbed their pockets of a few
pennies while they uttered “Have a Merry Christmas, my dears,” through their gritted teeth.
Christmas had caught them in its invisible but effective trap!

Although I realised that they were not all they could have been, in one way or another my
childhood Christmases were exciting, due to my impatient expectation that extraordinary
presents would appear, delivered, I was told and so believed, by Father Christmas, who was
represented as a kindly personage whose dwelling was the frozen wasteland around the North
Pole. I knew too little of that area to question such ‘facts.’

That was before Father Christmas had been fixed up with a Mother Christmas and a company of
elves, which is not surprising because nothing stays exactly as it used to be, and our beloved
institutions have to be brought up-to-date every couple of generations to keep them relevant.

I was to learn later that it was supposed to be a boy’s father who acted the part of Father
Christmas, but since my step-father didn’t take to me, I presumed it was my mother who climbed
the extra two flights of stairs to hang the receptacles bearing my Christmas gifts. However, on
reflection, my presents were probably placed by my Grandfather Bennett whose solitary attic
bedroom I shared. Little did he know how much his secret ministrations meant to me. Or
perhaps he guessed. Little acts of kindness make a child feel protected from the harshness of
life. Charles Dodgson, the author of “Alice in Wonderland,’ wrote:.

Without, the frost, the blinding snow,

The storm-wind’s moody madness –
Within, the firelight’s ruddy glow,
And childhood’s nest of gladness.
The magic words shall hold thee fast:
Thou shalt not heed the raving blast.
Christmas then, as now, was rich with vestiges of pre-Christian religions, when every tree might
house a god, every animal be a familiar, and the unknown forces of nature be venerated, feared,
or both.

The coming of Christianity to the British Isles had chased away these imaginative religions, but
their departure had not been complete, for the garlands that once decked the groves of outlandish
pagan gods are now pinned to our walls to herald the coming of Christmas, and sprigs of
mistletoe that once yielded to the golden knives of pagan priests, hung from our ceiling, although
I cannot remember any kissing taking place in my home, but who knows what transpired when
young eyes were closed and catch-all ears snuffed shut by sleep?

In Christian England the only house of worship where mistletoe was permitted
was in the Minster at York, the county town of Yorkshire. Mistletoe was frowned
on because of its ancient associations with Druids’ fertility rites. But at York
each Christmastide bundles of mistletoe were laid on the great altar before a sort
of ‘Urbi et Orbi’ manifesto of ‘a public liberty, pardon, and freedom to all sorts of
inferior and wicked people at the gates of the city to the four corners of the earth.’

In other places children played active parts in the festival of Christmas. In some parts Yorkshire
they wended their way from door to door to summon dwellers with their traditional call,

We wish you a Merry Christmas

And a Happy New Year.
Please may we be
The Lucky Birds here?

Then the doors would open and the ‘Lucky Birds’ be handed a few coppers. It is told that this
custom still lives. There were other customs that enchanted children in their Yorkshire
Christmas. It must be understood that Christmas was a time when more traditions of family,
community, and faith are loosed than in all the rest of the year, and children figure largely in
these. Author George Collard, in his delightful and informative book ‘A Yorkshire Christmas,’
tells us that the season was called Yorkshire’s ‘twelve days of madness, and then he details some
of the ancient folklore that in some form or other yet survives.

Of these, the one that has always tugged at my heartstrings and which brings tears to my eyes
and a lump in my throat as it did in my younger days is the legend that when Christmas Eve
turned into Christmas Day, the cattle in the byre would weep and kneel, and that if any was
present they would also be heard to speak! This deathless lore has been forged by Thomas
Hardy into a poem whose exquisite simplicity betrays the power of earnest faith that the world
has a hard time holding onto, but which is present in the hearts of children not yet tainted by the
doubts of a materialistic world. It is called, ‘The Oxen.’
 The Oxen
By Thomas Hardy (1915)

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen.
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few believe

In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve
“Come; see the oxen kneel

“In the lonely barton by yonder comb

Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

My classmates talked about Christmas and its anticipated prizes for weeks before it came. They
chatted excitedly about what they hoped ‘The Man in Red’ would bring to their bedsides –
though none of us dared risk calling him by any such impious name, lest he be offended, and you
know the cost of offending Father Christmas!

Children anticipated visits from favourite aunties, beneficent uncles, and in, some cases, from
spiteful cousins that would laugh at their prezzies, and brag about their own. It seems that even
Christmas can not entirely transform contentious souls, although it opened windows of
opportunity for self-improvement, but their sour natures shut such apertures as fast as they had
opened, and life for the cantankerous rolled on leaving them beyond the pale of the rapture that
brightened the spirits of harmonious folk. These differences in human nature are well defined by
Dickens in his excellent work, ‘A Christmas Carol,’ at the moment when the miserly Ebeneezer
Scrooge is visited by his cheerful nephew, Fred.

The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon
his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters.
Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it
looked like one coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box
in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master
predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on
his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not
being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

"A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!" cried a cheerful voice. It was the
 voice of Scrooge's nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first
intimation he had of his approach.

"Bah!" said Scrooge, "Humbug!"

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of
Scrooge's, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes
sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

"Christmas a humbug, uncle!" said Scrooge's nephew. "You don't mean that, I am
sure."

"I do," said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What
reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough."

"Come, then," returned the nephew gaily. "What right have you to be dismal?
What reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough."

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said "Bah!"
again; and followed it up with "Humbug."

"Don't be cross, uncle!" said the nephew.

"What else can I be," returned the uncle, "when I live in such a world of fools as
this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas time to
you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year
older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every
item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I
could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with
'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried
with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

Although I have no reason to doubt that my Auntie Nora and Uncle Will Stead and their four
children, our cousins, Brian, Shirley, Audrey, and Keith, visited us around Christmastime, I have
no recollection that they ever shared our feast, but neither do I remember any but pleasant words
passing between us, which is how it has always has been, and still.

The French ‘Magasin Pittoresque’ of 1850 has an article titled, "La Christmas,"
which includes an account of a charitable act performed on Christmas Day, but
whose author stringently condemns the seasonably philanthropic for deliberately
and habitually avoiding the poor who sat with them in Church on that festive day,
concluding dolefully that only in England are the old Yuletide traditions
honoured. He observes:
 “Now still, in England, Christmas is a time for bringing people together. The
gifts which among us are given on New Year's Day are exchanged among our
neighbours on the day of the Saviour’s birth. It is the time of banquets and of a
free and open hospitality across the isle. On every side chimneys smoke; the
baker's ovens overflow with meats brought by modest households; there the least
rich cook their Christmas treat; spits turn; streetlights, torches, lamps, candles
shine in the foggy night; from midnight, servants, the suppliers of great houses go,
singing to present the Christmas box where offerings fall.

Ah, let all men come to understand that he whose misery one eases may see in
you a benefactor, but one only becomes the brother of those whose joys we
share!”

Our Christmas came, as Christmas always does, and we children were ready for it. On
Christmas mornings, René, Arthur, and I woke before Old Sol had blinked his een, or ere
Chanticleer began his dawn ditty, and scrambled to the bottom of our beds to unhook the gift-
laden pillowcases off the corner bedposts, and tip up the knee socks that also hung with them that
held without annual variation an apple, an orange, and a shiny new penny. The pillowcase held
the present or presents. Our gifts might include a book, and or a game, and we felt well done to.

Presents of a different kind were delivered courtesy of the German Navy to

Scarborough Castle at Christmas of nineteen-fourteen. Although the Castle had
not been used as a military installation for more than two hundred and fifty years,
the German High Command decided to shell it from their warships steaming
through the North Sea.

Their principal targets were the ancient barrack buildings that served no purpose,
and after flattening these insignificant structures they coldly bombed the town of
Scarborough, damaging buildings and inflicting fatalities on those who were not
engaged in the war effort in any way except by keeping their morale high and
their hopes for victory strong, in the face of an action that served to deliver to its
perpetrators no advantages whatsoever.

It seemed to us in our World War Two Christmases, that every Christmas was a white Christmas
and more than passing cold besides. The short trousers I wore – obligatory at that time for
English schoolboys – allowed the snow, the sleet, and the unrelenting frost wet then freeze and
chap my legs to a painful raw redness that hurt all the more when I got back into the warm and
feeling returned to bring tears often in its wake. Emily Brönte’s woeful lyric catches the
awfulness of a winter that had been too harsh, stayed too long, and had admitted tragedy under
colour of innocence.
 It Was Night

It was night, and on the mountains

Fathoms deep the snow-drifts lay;
Streams and waterfalls and fountains
Down in darkness stole away.

Long ago the hopeless peasant

Lost his sheep all buried there:
Sheep that through the summer pleasant
He had watched with fondest care.

Now no more a cheerful ranger

Following pathways known of yore,
Sad he stood, a wildered stranger
On his own unbounded moor.

Safe in the warmth of a blazing coal fire at home, our Christmas decorations were grand green
paper garlands with deep red flowers at intervals and slung at great peril to those who climbed
rickety stepladders to fix them to the walls with drawing pins, and a couple of paper gala balls
that opened to show their cunning constructions and delightfully bright colours.

It was a sad sight when the austerity of wartime saw some of these replaced with chains made of
loops of paper lacking the depth of colour, the shapes, and the antique texture of the traditional
garlands that did not look as if they had been constructed by unsophisticated children. Looking
back to a time eighty-seven years before I was born, Catherine Waters wrote,

In 1848 the London Illustrated News carried a full-page engraving of the Royal
family encircling the Christmas tree at Windsor castle; the engraving became
widely known from its reprinting, and was accompanied by a description of the
decorations used to adorn the tree and an explanation of its function in the Royal
household. Clearly the custom of the tree met the needs of the new Christmas that
was in the making. It could be set up inside the home, the centre of the Victorian
family Christmas, it was a vehicle for the giving of presents suitable to the age
and sex of their recipients and its decoration was a source of great appeal to the
children who were rapidly becoming the focus of the institution.

We always had the same Christmas Tree. It was about two feet high, and its base was an
imitation plant pot made from wood, painted red, and lined around with a few fine bands of gold.
Its branches were cleverly made of twisted wire into which were inserted goose feathers that had
been dyed green and split along the length of their quills. Their barbs separated as the wire was
wound into a spiral, making favourable impressions the branches of fir trees, each of which was
tipped with a wooden holly berry.
 It is told that eighth century Christian Saint Boniface prevented a child from being
put to death as a human sacrifice by pagans when he knocked down the oak
sapling they were to use as the stake, and, miraculously, a fir tree sprang up in its
stead, whereupon Boniface declared the tree holy and charged faithful Christians
to have one in their houses surrounded with love and favours.

In eleventh century Europe fir trees were hung with apples to symbolise the Tree
of Life in the Garden of Eden. Trees appeared in homes in 1521 when Princess
Hélène de Mecklembourg carried one to her home in Paris after she married the
Duc de Orleans. This custom become so popular that Alsace almost ran out of
pine trees so their use was limited by statute to one tree to each house.

Hanoverian Kings brought the Christmas Tree, or Tannenbaum as they called it,
to England, but the English didn’t like the German Royal family and few followed
the custom until the reign of Queen Victoria. Decorations were home made, but
later in Victoria’s reign when the tree became more popular, they were hung with
ornaments fashioned from silver wire, candles, tinsel, and strings of glass beads.
In eighteen eighty-two fancy baubles made from garishly painted fine glass and
electric lights were introduced. Artificial trees were made in Germany in
nineteen-thirty and were made from goose feathers

Our well-worn glass baubles came out each Yuletide to deck the tree along with tiny candles in
crimped clip-on holders made of thin tin. These were never lit because they represented a fire
hazard and we had no wish to further the work of an enemy whose seasonal gifts included
incendiary bombs delivered by small parachutes. Our decorations seemed as eternal as
Christmas itself. The tree was always in place on the back sideboard on Christmas Morning to
greet us as we traipsed downstairs lugging our bulging sacks. In the innocence of childhood we
could not imagine a world without Christmas, and yet ...

In 1643, Parliament abolished Christmas celebrations, and Lord High Protector

Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas carols between 1649 and 1660. Cromwell
considered that Christmas should be kept as an intensely sacred day so the only
permitted celebration was a prayer service and a suitable sermon.

We dared not venture downstairs too early to show each other our gifts for fear of waking the
Kaken, alias Nanny, who had strict rules about children and what and when they could do what
the house regulations allowed. Going downstairs before a responsible and approved grown-up
had descended was not permitted, not even at Christmas.

When the familiar tread of our aged attendants was heard as one such left the bathroom to
descend the wooden hill, then it was that we dared also to descend to show what we had and to
enjoy each other’s gifts. I do not recall envy playing any part of these discoveries. I do not
remember everything about those times, but cannot remember that particular passion raising its
ugly head.

The English Christmas has been called, “ … the Christmas by which all other
Christmases are measured, wherever Christmas is celebrated,” and a scribbler
writing about Sir Roger de Coverley, a fictional character who typified the values
of an old English country gentleman, was portrayed as 'rather beloved than
esteemed' in the satirical magazine The Spectator of Tuesday, January 8, 1712,
wrote:

“Mr. Spectator,

“Sir Roger, after the laudable Custom of his Ancestors, always keeps open
House at Christmas. I learned from him that he had killed eight fat Hogs for the
Season, that he had dealt about his Chines very liberally amongst his Neighbours,
and that in particular he had sent a string of Hogs-puddings with a pack of Cards
to every poor Family in the Parish.

“I have often thought,” says Sir Roger, “it happens very well that Christmas
should fall out in the Middle of the Winter. It is the most dead uncomfortable
Time of the Year, when the poor People would suffer very much from their
Poverty and Cold, if they had not good Cheer, warm Fires, and Christmas
Gambols to support them.

“I love to rejoice their poor Hearts at this season, and to see the whole Village
merry in my great Hall. I allow a double Quantity of Malt to my small Beer, and
set it a running for twelve Days to every one that calls for it. I have always a
Piece of cold Beef and a Mince-Pye upon the Table, and am wonderfully pleased
to see my Tenants pass away a whole Evening in playing their innocent Tricks,
and smutting one another...”

Christmas food was always better than everyday food. Partly because it was better, richer, more
exotic fare than usual, and partly because of the Good Spirit of the Season that hovered over the
table, making us cheerful and boosting our appetites, as Christmas found its way into our home
for a brief stay.

At the centre of our festive board was the goose, besides which was a joint of roast beef, and
sometimes for a change a clove-studded pork joint that obliged with fulsomely delicious
crackling that made our teeth ache for chewing so much of it at the neglect of the flesh of the
swine.
Lesser in the hierarchy of presentations but equally welcome and palatable were boiled and roast
potatoes that vied with Brussels sprouts, buttered garden peas, and Yorkshire puddings to edge
the slices of meat over the edges of our plates and onto the floor where a well practised black cat
waited for manna from heaven. It did not have to wait very long nor very often.

Somewhere in the course of the main course the crackers are seized, pulled, the remains,
scavenged, and prizes claimed, and the de rigueur paper hats plonked unceremoniously onto our
festive heads. It was Christmas and we were having fun! An English Christmas with a cracker
for everyone just isn’t right.

Invented by London confectioner Tom Smith, in 1847, Christmas Crackers were

fashioned after his ‘bon-bon’ sweets, which he sold in what was to become the
standard twisted paper sweet-wrapper. Smith’s crackers were cardboard tubes
wrapped in brightly coloured crepe paper. They are pulled by two people to the
point where they break into two with a loud report. The biggest piece contains the
novelties.

The contents are a coloured paper hat or crown, a toy or other trinket, and a
printed motto or joke. Smith added the "crack" to his crackers after enjoying the
crack of a log in his fireplace. His son, Walter, to distinguish his father’s original
product from the scores of imitators that sprang up, was the first to put trinkets,
toys, and paper hats in them, and to vary their design.

After the meat course, during which we had pulled our crackers, plonked the crowns on our head
and tried to make sense of the groaner jokes, the Christmas pudding that had been wrapped in
sheets of muslin and boiled in the washboiler for many hours several weeks ago was borne in
with customary gravitas.

The pudding was as big as a leather football and topped with a rich white sauce and a sprig of
holly. It was set down in the middle of the table where the big meat plate had been, carved with
the meat knife, and thick wedges of it plopped onto our plates with a look from Nanny that made
us feel as if we didn’t deserve it. But, merited or not, we shovelled it into our mouths as if we
enjoyed it.

English Christmas pudding is a dense steamed pudding made from a variety of

dried fruit, nuts, brown sugars, black treacle or molasses, and suet or butter. It is
effectively black from the sugars and treacle and the long period of steaming or
baking involved in its cooking. The pudding dough can be soaked with citrus
juice, brandy, or other alcohol, unless you are a Latter-day Saint or other
teetotaller.

Christmas puddings are boiled in pudding cloths, that makes them round, but
since the beginning of the twentieth century they have also been prepared in
pudding basins. They are traditionally cooked several weeks before Christmas,
 and steamed for many hours, and served after it has been reheated by steaming,
and either dressed with a spicy white sauce, or with warmed brandy that is set
alight to emit flames as the pudding is borne in triumph to the dining table from
the kitchen.

Nanny’s luscious Christmas cake followed the pudding. One of the best parts of the season was
licking out the huge bowls after the cake and puddings had been mixed in them. To this day,
cake dough tastes better than cake to me. The Christmas Cake was almost as dense as the
pudding but had a different texture and flavour.

It was iced white, had a little festive nonsense on top, with a white, red, and green paper frill
around its outside. That frill acted out its part year on year until it was forced into early
retirement after a mere ten years due to losing an enthusiastic argument with the cake knife.

After the cake came the mince pies. Those not already pogged to busting became so after
forcing two or three of the rich pies into their mouths. The question of why we think we can
cram four or five times more than our normal intake down inside us when we are sat at the
Christmas table still awaits a sensible answer?

The mince pie began its life perhaps a thousand years ago in mediaeval kitchens
where it was called the "chewette," that was either baked or fried. Originally,
these were minced meat and spice confections, but eventually, dried fruit and
sweet ingredients were added for variety. By the sixteen hundreds, 'mince' or
shred pie was a Christmas speciality. By the mid-sixteen hundred, liver and
chopped meat were abandoned and were replaced by a mixture of minced suet,
dried fruits and peels, and nuts that were called ‘mincemeat,’ and still are despite
the fact that it contains no meat, or meat products apart from suet.

Mince pies are a favourite food of Father Christmas, and Yorkshire children and
their descendants always put a plate with a couple of them on in the hearth or in
some other place where he cannot miss them, along with a glass of milk and a
carrot or two for the reindeer, as thank you presents for well-filled stockings and
pillowcases, and for plenty on and around the tree.

Yorkshire tradition insists that the mincemeat mix is only to be stirred ‘sunwise’
or else you risk bad luck for the year ahead from affronting Sol Invictus, which is
evidence of the antiquity of the custom. It is also a Yorkshire tradition that you
make a wish when eating your first mince pie of the season, and that these
princely pies are eaten in solemn silence. Eating a minimum of one pie per day
on each of the Twelve days of Christmas is thought by some to bring good luck
for the coming year, and considered by cardiologists to be a heart attack in the
making!

The True Yorkshire Mince pie has a star on top representing the Star that led the
 Wise Men to baby Jesus in Bethlehem. Other counties have adopted the
Yorkshire customs. When ‘Mince Pyes’ are well made, they are incomparably
scrumptious.

Christmas is, as I have already said, a family time. But at Fitzwilliam Street it was never strictly
a family affair because several of our lodgers had nowhere else to go, having no family or friends
but us. It did not seem strange because they had always been there since we could remember.
But it make me realise, thinking about these men in later years, that it is a wretched and
unpredictable to be dependent on strangers for one’s home and kindred amenities. Christmas
must be hard on lonely old men when such friends as they had have died off, and they are left
alone with no one to make pleasant their staying or mourn their passing.

A pleasant and affable geniality settled on us as we sat there full in the sitting-cum-dining room
in the cellar of Nanny’s lodging house that was out home. Some of it was alcohol related,
although alcohol was never consumed at the dining table, but some had been out for an early
start at the pub, and whatever its cause it was a welcome change from the sour paranoia that
normally sullied the house and its victims. That proves that Christmas works its peculiar magic
everywhere, and that few are totally immune to its effects.

The story is told of the 'Christmas Truce' of 1914, in which the soldiers of the
Western Front laid down their arms on Christmas Day and met in ‘No Man's
Land,’ exchanging food and cigarettes, as well as playing football. The pause in
the fighting was unofficial and spontaneous, a gesture of goodwill from men
arrayed to kill each other. Not only is this a true story, but also it was more
widespread than most people are aware.

The most famous truce was that between British and German forces. However,
French and Belgium troops also took part. Some versions tell that British troops
heard their German opponents singing Christmas carols and joined in.

Private Frank Richards of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, said both sides erected signs
wishing the enemy 'Merry Christmas' and some men crossed the lines unarmed
with their hands in the air signifying that they were making a peaceful approach.
These were met by soldiers from the opposing side. By the time their officers had
latched onto what was happening the first meeting had already taken place. Most
officers then either looked the other way or else joined in.

In many sectors, the fraternisation lasted all of Christmas day. Exchanges of

Food and supplies were made and, it is told, in some places tools and equipment
were borrowed from the enemy to make their trenches more habitable.

Games of football were played using whatever came to hand for a ball, while
fallen comrades, abandoned on the battlefield between the entrenchments of the
warring armies that earned the name of ‘No Man's Land,’ were retrieved and
 buried as decently as possible.

In many zones of battle, the Christmas Truce lasted much longer. Richard's
account told how both sides held their fire over Boxing Day, when British troops
were relieved and left the front line. In other places, Christmas goodwill lasted
several weeks. But the demands of war urged ‘peace on earth, goodwill to all
men’ to finally wear off, and the murderous struggle was continued.

Our own Christmas didn’t last long either. As it died into the old year the good spirit seemed to
go with it. Before we were ready, Christmas was over, and the unaccustomed geniality had gone
as quickly as it had come, and the torment of daily routines rolled back over us as the chill of a
sea fret creeps ashore. It froze us to the bone, and buried all that we had experienced in our
short-lived Christmas.

Festoons were glumly taken down, and with their falling went our spirits as the magic was
refolded and stored for another long year. The little tree was stripped of its trinkets, its baubles
were boxed, and its lush limbs folded before it was reboxed, losing some of its berries in the
process to rattle around when the box was settled to its resting place on the shelf below the long
silent row of bells, there to slumber until summoned back into service the following year.

And then, too soon Christmas was extinguished. Yet, it had taken place, and because it had
something had changed. Exactly what the difference was is difficult to quantify, but something
had happened. Even though the world changed back to what it had been before Christmas had
come and motorists no longer picked up stranded revellers whose last buses had departed into the
darkness and foul weather of a winter’s night, something lingered in my heart. Something was at
work deep inside me. Christmas was working its merry magic. Although I did not know it,
nephew Fred knew what it was, and, perhaps, expressed Dicken’s own feelings for Christmas in
words he had Fred say to his unconverted Uncle Scrooge.

"...I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round –
apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging
to it can be apart from that – as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant
time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and
women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of
people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not
another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, though it has
never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me
good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"

Even after my toys were broken, and my games had mysteriously lost essential pieces, and the
whole seeming pretence of good times was over, something remained to work within me as yeast
works deep in dough, swelling, aerating, converting ordinary into wonderful, commonplace into
extraordinary, and what is banal into the miraculous, so I enjoyed faint stirrings that led me to
seek to understand what seemed inconceivable, and ask myself, “What is it that makes the
difference at Christmas? What, exactly, is Christmas?” The cold hard facts of history didn’t
shed much light on how a holiday could be so many things to so many people. I will tell you
some and you can see for yourself.

Christmas in England began in AD 597, when St Augustine landed on her shores

with monks who wanted to bring Christianity to the Anglo Saxons, who became
the English from their name, ‘Angles.’ the earliest mention of a special feast for
the Nativity, which is the Feast of the Birth of Jesus, being held on the 25th
December is in the Philocalian Calendar in the year 354, and refers to earlier such
feats dating from 336. In 388, Saint John Chrysostom – that means ‘Golden
Mouth,’ wrote that the observing of the festival of the Nativity on December 25th
‘was not yet ten years old.’ Records show that Augustine came to Britain with his
missionary monks from Rome, and on Christmas Day of 597 he baptised more
than ten thousand of the English into Christianity.

In the year 816, the Council of Chelsea enforced the observance of Christmas on
December 25th throughout Britain. In the time of the Saxon Ethelred 991-1016 –
it was decreed that the Nativity period should be one of peace and goodwill, when
all contention and arguing must end.

Until 1170, the Christmas was called by the Latin names of 'In Festis Nativitatis'
or 'Natalis,' meaning, The Feast of the Nativity, or Birth of Jesus Christ. The
anglicised form, 'Christes-Masse' did not come into usage until after the Norman
invasion in 1066.

In 1644 the Puritan Parliament first sat on Christmas Day to set a trend of 'no
Christmas,' and in 1645 they declared Christmas an ordinary working day, and
Christmas was forbidden! Anyone found making Christmas Mince Pyes could be
arrested and jailed.

After the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660, things got better,
but after over a hundred years of puritanical control, many of the old customs
were not restored as they had once been, although there was more than a hint of
the Christmases of Olde Merrie England that bled into Georgian England, for the
majority the old customs were lost, forgotten, and unimportant. The revival of
Christmas as an English religious festival centred on the family is due to
Victorian scholars interviewing ancients in the tiny villages of Northern England
where time slipped by more slowly than in the metropolitan conurbations, and
traditions were hung on to as revered contacts with their sacred past.

As I grew towards my teen years I learned at the Methodist Sunday School I

faithfully attended that Christmas was not really about Father Christmas, but that
Father Christmas himself was connected with a more profound and important
 festival that was hidden in the name Christmas, and that it was the remembrance
and celebration of the birth of a baby who was called Jesus, who was
miraculously born to God Almighty and a Jewish maid called Mary, and that
Jesus was the long awaited Messiah who gave his life as a sacrifice to save all
mankind. Yet there was much more to this Christmas thing than a history lesson.
It was an affair of the heart or else it was nothing. Archbishop Temple of York,
later of Canterbury, wrote of Christmas, explaining,

“All kinds of people, whatever their religious beliefs or disbeliefs, have adopted
Christmas as the festival of family and friendship. It is a great thing to have such
festival generally recognised, whether its religious basis is accepted or not. It
helps to keep together friendships which may be drifting into forgetfulness, and it
strengthens the bonds of affection alike between friends and kinfolk. Christmas
itself is a very real influence for the maintenance of goodwill amongst men.”

Of those points I was convinced early in my life, but there was something ‘other’ lurking behind
the seasonal facades of glitter, good humour, and feasting that I had not quite touched or been
touched by. Temple continued:

“What Christians commemorate on Christmas Day is not merely the Birth of a

Child who grew up to be a remarkable man; it is the turning point of human
history and the appearance within it of the Eternal God revealing Himself in
human life. ‘ The Word was made flesh and we beheld his glory.” … “So let us
feast and be merry, not because tomorrow we die but because today Jesus Christ
is born; and if that is the reason for our merriment, it will be such as to bring no
sorrow in its train.” … And when today is over let us carry that divine merriment
into our sombre and busy lives, and let all our mirth be such as Love Divine
inspires.

So it will be with us if we can join the Shepherds and the Kings in their worship at
the manger cradle. For to worship is to humble one’s self before Him to whom
worship is given and open one’s heart to receive Him. If we can humble
ourselves before the innocence of helpless childhood and open our hearts to
receive its simplicity, its trustfulness, its happiness, its love, then for us too
Christmas will have been the birthday of Love Divine in the hearts to which we
invite and welcome Him. Once more then, as when the day began, so now as it
draws to a close – Come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord.”
Then it made sense to me. It was not a profound theological truth that supplied the answer, nor
was it historical facts that meshed all the formerly grinding gears that milled around my
questions of Christmas and the changes that swept over people – especially my people, normally
so stolid and set in their daily rounds, and apparently unmoveable – it was nothing less than a
Divinely appointed miracle.

Poet Richard Crawshaw expressed our wonder at the Incarnation of the Son of God in his
contemplative work, “Sospetto D’Herode” in which a guilty King Herod contemplates what
Jesus might be and struggles to make sense of the contrasts between the Jesus he has
experienced, and what in his dark moments of cold fear he is afraid he might be.

That the great Angell-blincking light should shrinke

His gaze, to shine in a poore shepherd’s eye;
That the unmeasur’d God so low should sinke
As pris’ner in a few poore rags to lie;
That from His Mother’s Brest, he milke should drinke
Who feeds with nectar Heav’n’s faire family;
That a vile manger His low Bed should prove,
Who in a Throne of stars Thunders above.

That He Whom the Sun serves, should faintly peepe,

Through clouds of infant flesh: that the old
Eternal Word should be a child, and weepe:
That he who made the fire should feare the cold:
That Heav’n’s high Majesty his court should keepe
In a clay cottage, by each blast control’d:
That Glorie’s self should serve our griefs and feares:
And free Eternitie submit to yeares.

That the ‘unmeasur’d God’ was the Father of His Divine Son was the great ‘secret’ of Christmas
from which I had been so removed even as I had stood close to its signs as to touch but not
comprehend them, and with the sunrise of this understanding I knew the customary apparatus of
Christmas would never be the same to me again.

Yet what of my friend, Father Christmas? What could I make of him in the light of these new
truths? I had thought of Father Christmas as warm and well rounded, a dispenser of cheer and
good gifts, a transmogrifying power in a troubled and selfish world in which millions were
engaged in annihilating each other.

In 1822, American Clement Clarke Moore described his own image of Father Christmas in his
well known and oft-quoted poem, 'A Visit from St Nicholas.'

He was dressed all in fur from his head to his foot,

 And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a pedlar just opening his sack.

His eyes how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!

His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry;
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow.

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,

And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face, and a little round belly
That shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly.

He was chubby and plump,--a right jolly old elf--

And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself.

But until I actually discovered what motivated the original Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas of
Myra, a Christian bishop who habitually gave generous gifts to the poor and needy the mystery
remained unsolved. I found that Bishop Nicholas, sometimes referred to familiarly as ‘Saint
Nick,’ was actually imitating Jesus, whom he revered as the Christ the Only Begotten Son of
God, and the Saviour and Redeemer of mankind.

I learned that Jesus ministered to the poor, the needy, the outcast, and that he taught that God
was love, and therefore we should love each other. So powerful is his message that even when
watered down to little more than a transparency, it retains its power to transform lives,
communities, and nations, even my childhood home. Christmas was and always will be a
miracle of immense proportions. I had come to understand that the ‘founder of the feast’ was not
Father Christmas, but his exemplar Jesus Christ, who is Christmas Himself.

Yet my Christmas celebrations do not omit Father Christmas. Rather it honours his example as
he honoured the example of the One he served. I like Christmas because it is a special time for
children. I like children and used to be one myself. Now that I know the secret of Christmas it is
always a special time and will remain so no matter how old I become.

Since I laid bare the essential of the Christmas Gift, Christmas is much more than baubles, trees,
candles, gifts, feasting, baking, Father Christmas, friends, and warm fuzzy love. I have been
privileged to unwrap the mystery of the Gift that long puzzled me, and to find at its heart the
Babe of Bethlehem whose universal love breaks through the troubles and trials of this
disappointing world, and touches our hearts, even though we do not know what is happening to
us, or why. Christ’s Love is the heart of the gift of Christmas whose power I have felt and
witnessed in all the Christmases in all the long years of my life.

With that precious Gift locked in my heart it is certain that if our festive board were bare, our
tree a shabby thing devoid of gifts, and if the usual raft of cards from old friends did not come, or
no visitor crossed our threshold, Christmas would still be the consummate experience because of
Him whom we honour by its keeping.

Tiny Tim was understandably mistaken when he saluted Ebeneezer Scrooge as ‘the founder of
the feast!’ Cratchitt’s employer, the miserly and ill-humoured crank who scoffed at Christmas
and would not open his heart or his purse to help a soul in need, was changed by the pure Love
of Christ which is the Divine gift of Charity described by the Apostle Paul as the greatest of all
spiritual gifts.

Scrooge, the old skinflint, was frightened into being Christlike. But whatever his motivation the
important thing is that he made the transition, and that saved him from misery in mortality and an
eternity of being weighed down with chains forged from his sin and from despising his
fellowmen.

I know that the changes to which I was led have saved me from a life starved of faith, hope, and
charity, and have increased my capacity to love and be loved. And so, with overflowing, heart I
raise my voice and say,

“Thank you Jesus, and a Holy and Merry Christmas to you for the greatest of all Christmas gifts
and for an enchantment that stays on and on long after December twenty-fifth has been
swallowed up by the Old Year.”

How different are my Christmases now that I have been led to unwrap the greatest Gift of all!
And how grateful to God I am for the gift of his Son Jesus Christ. May we all remember as we
unwrap our wondrous gifts this Christmas that one gift that is at the centre of all we do and all
we feel.

God bless our Christmas as remembering

God’s holy Son, a tiny babe was he;
Whose coming long had been foretold
But whom the eyes of faith
Alone could see.

Helpless then he who would our helper be,

And needing succouring
Who succours you and me
With his eternal love and gifts
That raise us from the earth
To heaven, and higher than we know
To sit with him in glory

He gave the gift none other could

A spotless Lamb to cleanse with blood
And seal our souls to be with him,
The Saviour, and to share
In all his Father has prepared
To seal on him, and he on us,
Bound each to each, and all to God.
 It is the babe who, lying there
In manger straw, the veil divides.
He shows us, walking this dark earth,
What he had won for us to share
With Him when he returned
To sit on God’s pure throne
And, beckoning, summon us to home.

Yet some who look on his sweet face,

See but a baby; others see the Christ.
Some think him trifling, human.
Others know him Lord, the Son of God.

Yet so today, some see though God-filled eyes

The Saviour of mankind,
Whilst others to his state are careless, blind,
And slow to see the infant in the straw
As the fulfiller of the ancient Law.
The promised Christ,
The answer to our need,
To save and raise we who are Adam’s seed.

He lifts the stumbling, rests the weary soul,

Comforts the dying, makes the sinner whole.
And from the pain with which our days are rife,
He heals and grants eternal life.

And me, what do I see when I behold his face?

In his dear eyes I see the fount of love,
The vessel of God’s grace.
The promises that at a coming day
Will raise me to his side, and keep me safe always.

And though at Christmastime I smile to see

Him shown a swaddled child,
I will remember his divinity, his making free
My stricken soul, on whom he looked and smiled.

Then shall this time be filled with thoughts of love

For him who for us left his home above
To serve, to teach, to suffer and to die,
That each of us shall not abandoned lie,
But rise on shafts of glorious light
To see our Father God in heaven’s light
When at the end our shining souls take flight
To God the Father.

To God the Father I give thanks to know

He sent his Son to look on us below,
To make us his as once before we were
And take us home again in peace and joy.
NOTE: I cannot remember whether I wrote this poem or copied it from someone.
If you have information that would settle the issue for me,
please let me know at: QUILL@YorkshireTales.com
Thank you, Ronnie

Copyright © Christmas 2007

 Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED