How to ruin Christmas

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

Natalie Garrett

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….

Article

Belief

Comment

Leading

9 May 2025

4 min read

Here’s what Pope Leo really needs, and it’s not our speculation

What the media analysis misses when projecting on to the new pope.

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

Vatican Media.

If memory serves, there was a very positive feeling about Pope Francis when he was elected in 2013. Mind you, I had just started my first year at university and was passionately atheistic - I had flunked my ‘General Studies’ A-Level essay purely because I had nothing to say in favour of the proposal that heaven exists. It was plain enough to me that it was all unscientific wish-fulfilment - so a requirement to give balance had to be jettisoned.

But the late Pope was so adept at doing things that sent a message, that even in my sphere it became commonly agreed that he was a breath of fresh air. Anyone would tell you that he was very down-to-earth. PR types can only dream of that kind of cache among those who have zero interest in what the company is selling.

The less ostentatious popemobile!

The refusal to live in the official papal apartments!

Here was a man clearly wanting to step back from pomp, and the wealth (all that Vatican gold!).

It is only now that, as a Catholic, I have an inside track perspective on how more complicated this all actually was. Some in the Church found some of the public piety unsettling. All churches have a trade-off to make between the gospel directive to not value treasure on earth, as well as a gospel directive to give honour to God using all of our humanity, which might involve using our sense of beauty.

But I am not saying I agree or disagree with any of this. Francis was making a point, and it was well made. I am rather saying that there is a tendency sometimes to think of a pontiff in ill-fitting terms - often political ones. As an atheist, I crammed things into a binary of ‘good, stripped-down rationalisation’ versus ‘bad, mythological and weird’. Especially in secular media, there is a tendency to make popes answers to questions that the media have asked, and not the ones of the Church. The story is always more intricate than ‘liberal’ versus ‘conservative’. Francis was not, in the end, the moderniser some commentariat hoped for, but only because he demonstrated what should have already been obvious: that that the Pope is not ‘in charge of’ the Catholic Faith like that.

At any rate, speculation of a similar kind is already booming around the new Pope, Leo XIV. Everyone is trying to read into every micro-detail we have. What is the significance of his being an American? Is this the conclave’s attempt to create a counter-Trump? Why did Leo come out in traditional garb (which Francis made a point of eschewing)? Why ‘Leo’?

Rumours have already abounded that this new Pope likes to do his private masses in the old Latin; others have pointed out that he ran with Francis’ crowd - and even his opening speech touched on the late Pope’s theme of ‘synodality.’ Synodality, depending on who you ask, is either a noble attempt at decentralisation and listening to the full range of voices in the Church - or an attempt to sneak doctrinal change under the guise of being pastoral.

My advice is to stay well away from it all. Perhaps I’m bringing my own personal journey in too much here - but people change their minds all the time. I wouldn’t want someone to judge me on that General Studies essay now, let me tell you. People especially change when given such a task as Robert Prevost has been given. Even on a purely natural view, being handed responsibility for over a billion Catholics is likely to have a sobering effect, and make one hyper-aware of every move one is about to make.

But, more importantly, on a supernatural lens, Catholics will want to say that this Pope has been, at the very least, permitted by the Holy Spirit. Benedict XVI put it as dismally as this, in 1997:

"Probably the only assurance [the Holy Spirit] offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined.”

Pope Leo’s ability to shepherd the Church is not a power he enjoys on his own - it comes, as the official teaching has it, “by virtue of his office.” He gets it purely from God, and by existing in relationship to a bigger thing, the Church. It is a difficult thing to make sense of, but the Catholic view of the Pope is not really a statement about human power. It is the belief that, at some very foundational level of analysis, Jesus has agreed not to abandon those who follow him; agreed not to “leave us as orphans." The Pope has come to be seen, in time, as that foundation; as that ‘rock’. But he should always be seen within the bigger picture of God’s promises to us.

For the meantime, the Pope needs not analysis, second-guessing, or projections. He needs prayers.

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