By Brendan Walsh, Editor of The Tablet
Christmas remains a central feature of British culture, even if that culture has only a dim recall of what is being celebrated.
But in the exchanging of gifts, the school holidays, the office parties and the sometimes awkward bonhomie of family gatherings there is a trace of a memory of a decisive event in human history.
It is not so much that secular Britain has thrown out the Christmas baby with the bathwater, but that it has thrown out the baby and kept the bathwater.
But, as we argue in The Tablet magazine editorial this week, the bathwater, too, can be holy.
Though mistranslated, as Biblical scholars all seem to agree, the angelic greeting from the heavenly hosts to the shepherds watching their flocks still resonates: “Peace, good will toward men” as the King James Bible puts it.
Fashionable though it is to deplore the “commercialisation of Christmas”, perhaps we have to grudgingly admit that without its commercialisation Christmas might have gone the way of Whitsun, which nobody has found a way to monetise and hence has more or less vanished from the national calendar.
And – although of course we can get carried away – exchanging presents does usefully cultivate a virtuous disposition.
But of course the bathwater without the baby is unlikely to be unsustainable in the long run.
Christmas without Christ will almost certainly, though gradually and imperceptibly, turn into something else – a bacchanalia of blatant hedonism, perhaps, for those inside, while a growing minority suffer exclusion and deprivation.
Brute self-interest might prevail as the only ethic still standing.
School nativity scenes: The bathwater without the baby is unlikely to be unsustainable in the long run. Pictures by Bill Heaney