Somewhere over the Rainbow?

By Susie Snyder

Oh dear. I just had lunch with the editor – and he asked me what I was planning to write. I mumbled rather apologetically that I hadn’t really had any inspiration as yet, but that it would probably be something to do with ‘Christmas’. Original or what? He mumbled back with what can only be described as barely disguised terror: ‘Christmas from a different angle?’ Think he thought I was actually going to write something religious this time.

Here’s my problem. Hasn’t everything already been said about Christmas? It’s the same every year. Loads of us, whether we’re Christian or not, bang on about how it’s lost its meaning, that we spend too much on commercial hype, that we should be thinking about the baby in the manger rather than the turkey in the oven. I’m preaching at one of our Christmas services this year and haven’t got a clue what I’m going to say. It’s all been said before and I do sohate being predictable. In fact, I’m not alone among the clergy in arriving at December without the sense of joyful anticipation you might imagine.

It all starts with people saying, ‘Oh, it must be your busy time of year,’ as if we don’t work at any other time. Then there are those grating jingles in the shops everywhere you go – oh, and the endless mince pies and mulled wine and soggy brussel sprouts. The final straw, in my case, is the seriously underestimated effect of OD-ing on Christmas carols. There are only so many times that any human being can croon We Three Kings without having an identity-crisis, and my health insurance doesn’t cover frostbite damage to toes induced by carol singing around the streets in the freezing cold. Have you ever thought about some of the words too? Take Once in Royal David’s City. It contains the lines

And, through all his wondrous childhood,
he would honour and obey…
Christian children all must be
mild, obedient, good as he.
he was little, weak and helpless…

I don’t know about you, but there aren’t many children I know like this – and who’d want them anyway? This is rosy-tinted Victorian sentimentalism at its worst. Scrooge. What really baffles me then is why most of us still make such a big thing about Christmas. Particularly as the vast majority of us rarely if ever set foot inside a church. Whatever we say about it having got out of control, what a hassle it is and how expensive, how it’s lost its real meaning, we still seem to love it. Festive season spending apparently reached an average of £837 per person last year.

So what’s this all about? Why don’t we just forget about Christmas and spend the money on something we actually want? Well, I reckon it’s because most of us crave escapism. Our lives seem either to be full of the routine mundane or full of crises: we find ourselves unemployed or overworked, bereaved or ill or depressed, in debt or having a relationship disaster or worried sick about our kids. Christmas offers us a temporary escape.  It’s a space where things glow with a comforting, rosy haze:  children dress up as angels with tinsel halos, lions play with lambs in a stable lit by a twinkly star. It’s the season of happy families, parties and feasting and surprise presents and universal good will. And of course there’s the possibility of having a new start and erasing all the bad stuff of last year as Big Ben dongs 12 and announces 2008.

The Christmas season offers us a warm fuzzy feeling, a glimpse of an idyllic world, an ejector seat out of the daily grind and slog and mess. In fact, that’s probably why quite a few people don’t mind doing ‘religion’ at Christmas: carol services and Midnight Mass are exactly what most of us want religion to be about – candles and beauty and safety, something different and detached from the real world. And I’m all for a dollop of escapism. We could do with a good deal more fun and fantasy in our lives: I wouldn’t miss my Christmas stocking or cheesy New Year’s Eve mistletoe moments or my three hour fix of Mary Poppins or The Wizard of Oz for anything.

The problem is that we seem to get stuck with an either/or. We give ourselves a choice between fantasy land and the periodically crisis-ridden daily grind. We’re either ‘somewhere over the rainbow’, romantically skipping down the colourful yellow brick road on our way towards a happy ending. Or we’re back in grey, dull old Kansas, denouncing that place over the rainbow as pure fiction: it’s just not real life and never can be. But what if it could be? Changing anything – the world, our life, ourselves – always starts with a dream. Think of Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech or the vision of the slave trade abolitionists. The worlds they were suggesting were a complete fantasy at the time. But slowly, step by step, they made them a reality. As Eleanor Roosevelt put it, ‘The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.’ And this, it seems to me, is what hope is about. Hope is different from sentimentality because it’s always the product of both/and rather than either/or thinking. Hope is what emerges when we combine our wildest dreams with an equal amount of gritty realism.

Mmm. It looks like I really must try to de-Scrooge then and start indulging in a good dose of festive fantasy. Think I’m going to spend Christmas Day dreaming of that world over the rainbow. Visions of ruby slippers and dancing scarecrows are already coming happily to mind. The New Year’s resolution is going to be a bit tougher though: that’s got to be about helping to turn that dream into a reality. So if you’ve any ideas on how we can bring the other side of the rainbow to this side of it, do let me know – and preferably before 1 January.

Susie is curate at St Mary’s Church