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Christmas survival
5 min read

How to ruin Christmas

Actor turned vicar Natalie Garrett, recounts the perils of being a Christmas Pro.

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

A nativity seen with wooden figures and hay, amidst which a cat sits in the manger.
Nativity cat, Warsaw, 2012.
Kacper Pempel.

So, during the years of my acting career, I always avoided Panto (oh yes I did). Not because I don’t like Panto, I love a good Panto. But because I didn’t want to work over Christmas. How God will have chortled at that great irony, knowing as he did that as of 2005 (the year I got ordained), I would be working every Christmas for the rest of time. 

Christmas is different now. Not only am I ordained, I’m married to a vicar. I’m completely immersed in professional Christmas. And Christmas is a bit different when you’ve turned pro. I won’t go so far as to say that being ordained has ruined Christmas, but it’s certainly changed it. But so has (supposedly) being a grown up.  

My “Proper Christmas” will always be the Christmas that I grew up with (is that just me?). I had traditional preparing-for-Christmas jobs that I did every year on Christmas Eve eve: polishing the special cutlery we only used once a year, making the brandy butter (which is a bit odd now I think about it, being that heavily involved with brandy from the age of six) and decorating The Tree. And having the annual argument with my sister about whose turn it was to take the present to our neighbours across the road. And eating a lot of satsumas. And chocolate. And seeing my cousins and playing Trivial Pursuit. All of which looks very rosy seen through the eyes of a child. Christmas is different when you’re ordained and you have to work, but it’s also very different when you’re the grown up. 

I used to think my mother made a ridiculous amount of fuss about Christmas. I am now that same mother. I think it’s Michael McIntyre who does a whole routine about women starting to write their Christmas To Do lists in October and endlessly shrieking, “there’s so much to do!” That’s me folks. Christmas as a grown up – or at least for this grown up – feels like there’s so much to do! 

I always imagine (unhelpfully fantasize) that Other People’s families are living the Christmas dream – the relaxed, cosy evenings drinking hot chocolate or eggnog in front of a roaring fire; laughing and playing wholesome games happily and peacefully with their angelic children, wearing matching Christmas jumpers. In the cold light of day, I realise that, actually, most people find Christmas stressful for a million different reasons. It’s not all twinkly and bright. 

For many people, Christmas means seeing all the family that they avoid during the rest of the year. It means spending money they can ill-afford on presents that may not be wanted. Christmas means missing the people who aren’t with us anymore. It means endless advertising campaigns suggesting that you aren’t living the perfect life – but that if you buy a new sofa, you’ll salvage the ruins of your life just in time for a perfect, twinkly Christmas. 

And so the life of the mythical twinkly, “magical” Christmas lives on. With little or no reference to its origin story. 

I was the chaplain at a Church of England secondary comprehensive school for seven years. In my first term, putting together the carol service, I asked a class chapel rep if she would do one of the Bible readings. “Oh, is Christmas in the Bible?” Huh. Another conversation I had went along the lines of, “Miss, I don’t believe in Jesus and all that religious stuff. But I believe in the spirit of Christmas.” Huh. 

There’s a song in the staged musical version of the film Nativity, which is to all intents and purposes a Christmas prayer. But instead of the prayer being directed at God, it is directed at Father Christmas; 

Dear Father Christmas, make our wish come true 

Dear Father Christmas send your spirit through 

There are Children in the world who need you way more than we do 

But Father Christmas, we still believe in you 

Dear Father Christmas make our wish come true 

Which brings me to a difficult moment in my Christmassy life. I have a parenting policy that demands that I tell my children the truth. Whatever the question, if I know the answer, I will give it to them honestly. So, when my children were around the ages of four and six, in the middle of Sainsbury’s, with both children piled into the trolley, in mid-November, surrounded by early Christmas-abilia, one of my children asked me, “Mummy, does Father Christmas really exist?”. (SPOILER ALERT!!). I had to give an honest answer. If the question had been less straight, if there had been any wriggle room at all, I would have fudged it. But a straight question deserved a straight answer. Which, wide-eyed, they went and shared with their friends. A crowd of angry parents from their Primary school came to church to complain that the Vicar’s children had ruined Christmas. 

But my point was that if I were to tell my children that I believe Father Christmas exists and that he grants Christmas wishes, were they ever to find out that I had lied (ahem), how would they trust me when I say that I believe Jesus does exist and that he does answer prayers? The challenge has lived with me ever since: how to keep Christmas rooted in Christ without ruining the Christmas magic. 

Well, my saving grace is that I’m still a sucker for a bit of Christmas schmaltz. The theologically sensitive part of me absolutely abhors Away in a Manger (“no crying he makes”? Really? He was a new-born baby, of course he cried!!) and Little Donkey (in the Bible accounts there is absolutely no mention of donkeys at all. Not a single one – not on the road, not in the stable. No cows, no donkeys.) But light some candles, get the children singing and I have tears pouring down my face with the best of them, loving every moment.  

But that still doesn’t mean that the essence of Christmas is the twinkly magic. Because, of course, the first Christmas was neither twinkly nor magic. Nor did it involve a perfectly curated tablescape (which I also love at Christmas). It didn’t involve any the stereotypical Christmassy things that we all get stressed about and love in equal measure. The first Christmas was messy and difficult. But it was also the most real, most genuinely joyous event in human history. Apart from Easter. Don’t get me started on chocolate bunnies….

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Development
Justice
Music
5 min read

Millions of people are still cold, hungry and naked – will you be there?

The call to justice that echoes from Trafalgar Square to primary schools

Pete Moorey is a campaigner for Christian Aid.

A school choir sings in an ornate abbey setting
Twyford School Choir sings in Westminster Abbey.
Dean & Chapter of Westminster.

I’m getting close to my 50th birthday, so I’m prone to nostalgia. My mind wanders back forty years to my primary school days in the early 1980s in a village in Sussex.  

Once or twice a week, we’d have school assembly. This included singing hymns. Not something that a shy seven-year-old would usually enjoy. But, in fact, we belted out a series of classics with gusto, accompanied by an almost proficient teacher on an almost tuned piano. 

To Be A Pilgrim with its lyrics about fighting giants. All Things Bright And Beautiful and those purple headed mountains. And then our favourite When I Needed A Neighbour with the opportunity to scream out the words “I was cold, I was NAKED!” at top volume, cheekily looking at your classmates as you asked, “Were you there?” 

The thing about those hymns was that the lyrics stuck. Not just now, decades on, but even back then. And so when a teacher in assembly started to talk to the school about the famine in Ethiopia or the hurricane in the Caribbean, you began to think “Is that my neighbour?”  And when your church encouraged you to deliver envelopes door to door to raise money for Christian Aid Week, you asked yourself “Was I there?” 

Of course that was the intention of those songs. The story of When I Needed A Neighbour is bound up with the history of social justice movements in the UK and in particular the organisation I work for, Christian Aid. 

Christian Aid was founded in 1945 by the British and Irish churches, who felt convicted to do something to tackle the refugee crisis and poverty sweeping across Europe following the Second World War. 

By the late 1950s, it was running Christian Aid Week - a big charity appeal to tackle global poverty long before Live Aid or Comic Relief. And as Christian Aid reached its twentieth anniversary in 1965, this annual fundraiser was a big deal. 

Such a big deal in fact, it decided to launch the fundraiser in Trafalgar Square by running a Beat & Folk Festival. You can find an old newsreel of the occasion on YouTube. Nelson’s Column is surrounded by thousands of young people listening to the Christian equivalent of Peter, Paul and Mary and getting fired up about global injustice. 

For the occasion, the then Christian Aid area secretary for London, Brian Frost, decided that a new song needed to be written. And so he approached the modern hymn writer of the moment, Sydney Carter. Two years early, Sydney had written his most famous hymn Lord of the Dance

Brian was of that era when Christians were at the heart of the anti-apartheid movement and committed to ecumenical action. And so combining this passion for social justice and the folk song mastery of Carter - When I Needed A Neighbour was born.  

As Christian Aid marks its 80th anniversary, we revisited this classic. When you watch the newsreel of an early performance in 1965, you quickly realise its folk credentials. It’s not just the fact that it’s being sung by marvellously hirsute men, it’s also there in the folk melody, guitar accompaniment and sung refrains.  

A year later Sydney Carter would record an EP that included Lord of the Dance which featured the folk royalty of Martin Carthy on guitar. For folk aficionados, you’ll know him as one of the English folk music greats - married to the incredible Norma Watterson and father to Eliza Carthy. For those less familiar with the genre, he was also an important inspiration for Paul Simon and Bob Dylan - yes, him off A Complete Unknown. 

There’s no evidence that Martin appeared on When I Needed A Neighbour but I think his involvement a year later confirms that the song sits firmly in the Sixties folk music boom. To young ears, it would have been hip. To older ears, perhaps scandalous.  

How do you reimagine such a classic as When I Needed a Neighbour, 60 years on from its birth - and now 80 years into Christian Aid’s history? Especially at a time when we witness our global neighbours in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, the DRC, and more wondering if - in the face of conflict and humanitarian disaster - anyone is there. 

We started with the lyrics. In 1965, Sydney Carter captured something of the simplicity of the issue at hand. People are cold, hungry and in need of shelter. And there’s something that each and every one of us can do, in our common humanity, no matter who we are, whatever our creed, ethnicity or background. 

Within a few years of the song being written however, Christian Aid had a lightbulb moment - it wasn’t enough for us to respond to emergencies around the world. Not enough also to work with communities on long term economic development. No, if are to live out God’s call to act justly and to love mercy, then we needed to be part of movements tackling the unjust structures and systems that result in poverty and inequality around the world. 

And so in returning to When I Needed A Neighbour and working with hymn writer Ally Barrett, we have now written new words that act as a call to each and every one of us to be a neighbour by speaking out for justice. This is something that Christian Aid has done throughout our history, calling for action to drop the debt in the 1990s or as one of the first development organisations campaigning for climate justice in the 2000s. 

This week we marked our 80th anniversary at Westminster Abbey by recommitting ourselves to God’s call for justice. And this included the Kingdom Choir (who famously sang at Harry and Megan’s wedding) and the Sacred Choir from Twyford Church of England school in London performing a gospel-tinged version of When I Needed A Neighbour

My hope is that, 60 years on, the song will still carry resonance. In an age when conflicts rage, the climate crisis runs riot and inequality is rife, isn’t it time to answer When I Needed A Neighbour’s call again? 

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