If you think Christmas is ‘right’ you’ve got it wrong

Contrasting cathedral Christmases conjure world-changing subversion.

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

A carol singer looks down while candles flicker.

Coventry Cathedral.

Christmas.

The very word is loaded with associations and memories and history and meaning. Just looking at it written down conjures up years of my childhood and particular feelings and impressions and smells. And for good or ill, it seems that that’s the case for most people. Ask any group of individuals for the three words that represent Christmas to them, and you’ll end up with myriad different answers – and an argument about why each person is right and everyone else is wrong!

Interestingly though, Christmas has changed in meaning for me in recent years. Ever since Covid in fact – that weird, strange, historic, awful-in-many-ways-but-unexpectedly-good-in-others period, that already feels like quite a long time ago. Christmas had one significance before it and another afterwards, and the latter is actually much more important.

It was a place that stamped it into my mind; two very different experiences of it, with the second one over-writing and enriching the first. It was Coventry Cathedral.

So. Every year for the 20 years before Covid, we went to the cathedral on Christmas Eve for an afternoon service called The Road to Bethlehem. My husband had been going nearly all his life, having been a chorister there from the age of seven. We gathered with a big group of friends and acquaintances into an enormous rag-tag choir, first for a rehearsal in the undercroft beneath the cathedral before going upstairs to join the equally enormous orchestra for a bit more practice before the service itself. Everyone was in Christmas jumpers and antlers and sparkly earrings, and the conductors of both choir and orchestra had to stand on boxes so we could see them and they could see each other. It was the only time each year that all the singers and players came together, many of them teenagers home from uni, and the whole atmosphere was buzzy and excited.

In addition to all the hundreds of musicians, gradually then the congregation began to pour in – masses and masses of children among them, nearly all dressed up in nativity costumes. There were crowds of shepherds and angels, hordes of wise men, smatterings of Marys and Josephs and a good crop of baby Jesuses, along with Batman and Spiderman and plenty of princesses who came along for the ride. And all of them during the service moved round the cathedral, from Nazareth at the start, via the nasty innkeeper who told them to clear off, no room in the inn (aka the Lady Chapel), to the hills full of sheep behind the altar, and fetched up in the stable down by the font at the end – with the choir and orchestra belting out appropriate carols at each stage. It was absolute mayhem, with babies yelling and small shepherds whacking each other with light sabres and our friend Mark – a professional tenor – singing sublimely overhead as Angel Gabriel. The cathedral was packed to groaning and at the close, when everyone was asked to light the candles they’d been holding throughout, it was also filled with light and heat and noise as everyone bellowed ‘Oh Come All ye Faithful’ at full volume, the trumpets and tubas giving it large and the kettledrums and cymbals thundering and crashing. It was exhausting, but so wonderful.

And then, 2020.

We didn’t think we’d get to the cathedral at all that year, but the decision was made to hold mini carol services – five of them – across two weekends, sung by small groups from the cathedral’s own choirs, with congregations being admitted by ticket to sit in household clumps, face masks on and no joining in please. It was dark when we got there, and raining, and the streets in Coventry were empty. The people attending the service, not many of them, were stretched in a silent line outside the doors, big gaps between them, masks on, no talking. Inside too, the lighting was low and chairs stood in lonely islands of two, empty acres of space between them (though my husband did firmly go and get a third chair so he and I and our daughter could sit together). I didn’t realise that the lady who let us in was someone I’ve sung with for years – her hair had grown and I couldn’t see her face or hear her voice properly, and when a small choir of girls filed silently in followed by the director of music looking extremely severe, I found it difficult not to cry. In fact for a considerable part of the service I did cry, which was such a pain as it misted up my glasses and I couldn’t wipe my eyes or nose because of the wretched mask.

But something interesting happened as I sat there struggling with all of this. Because, I think, of the quietness and the emptiness, I started to notice the cathedral itself – to feel its presence around me, to see its bones. There is an enormous tapestry there behind the altar, a vast portrait of Christ – strange and distorted and Picasso-like, full of symbols and odd colours – and it is very cleverly lit so that nearly all of it is in shadow except for Christ’s face, with piercing eyes that seem to look directly at you wherever you stand. In front of it are flights of highly stylised wooden doves fixed to the tops of the choir stalls, silhouetted against the tapestry as sharp crisscross shapes. There were lines and lines of tea lights on the ground along the steps, around the base of the pulpit, across the altar rail – like twinkling necklaces of light, reflected in the polished stone floor and casting strange upward shadows on the faces of the choir. And not singing and not joining in the spoken stuff meant I really began to listen – to the quietness of the building, to the sounds from the city outside, to my daughter breathing next to me, to the words of carols I know so well that I stopped hearing them years ago. It was like a sort of warmth creeping over me – I could almost feel it coming up from the floor and gradually making me feel better.

One of the canons gave the address. She looked as if she had been crying herself. ‘It’s not right, is it!’ she cried passionately. ‘That we’re separated from the people we love, that so many are afraid, or sick, that millions have lost livelihoods and now fear for the future, that our young people are missing out on friendships and education, that there’ll be empty places at so many tables.’ But, she went on to say, Christmas has never been ‘right’, not from the beginning. ‘Think of Mary’, she said. ‘So young and so vulnerable – having to give birth to her first child without her mother and aunties, not even with a proper roof over her head or a bed to rest on. Just a pile of straw and a man who wasn’t sure he even wanted to be with her at that point.’ I thought of my colleague, about to have her first baby, with her birth plan and her ‘nesting’ and her husband spending half the night wrestling with the new pram – so loved and precious, not lonely or homeless or disgraced.

‘And what about the shepherds?’ the canon continued. ‘Outcasts, forgotten ones, the lowliest of lowlies, poorest of the poor – but it was they who the angels visited. And it was only common sense that took the Wise Men to Herod’s palace. They were seeking a king after all… but they couldn’t have been more wrong, could they!’

Christmas is always all wrong, in other words. It’s meant to be. It’s meant to subvert the order of things, to teach us new lessons, to get us to think differently. So in many ways, the horrible upside-down 2020 Christmas with the world in disarray was just like the first one. And as with that one, there was light and wonder to be found, which darkness has never quenched yet.

It doesn’t matter, I don’t think, whether you believe or don’t believe in the existence of God: the fact is that the nativity is an extraordinary story that has guided millions of people for centuries, and inspired and comforted and influenced them in all kinds of ways. Even by itself, that is amazing. And the miserableness of Covid and upset and disruption and spoilt plans were – weirdly – the reason that I heard the story differently that year.

It is all right for things to be all wrong.

And because of hearing it like this, I have found that it’s given me a new kind of resilience – a higher capacity for tolerating wrongness; a cheerfulness that is not entirely centred in everything being fine and everyone behaving beautifully. Which, let’s face it, is just as well… and probably the very best gift that Christmas can give to anyone.

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Review

Culture

Film & TV

Language

Music

14 November 2025

6 min read

The Phoenician Scheme - opening the mind to wider horizons

Wes Anderson's new film widens our vision to a bigger world

Oliver Wright

Oliver is a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford, writing and speaking about theology and AI.

Characters from a Wes Anderson film sit in a stylish plane interior.

Benicio del Toro and Mia Threapleton star.

Wes Anderson’s latest film – The Phoenician Scheme – has caused as much confusion amongst critics and viewers as it has the usual delight. It tells the story of Anatole – Zsa-Zsa – Korda, his mad-cap business scheme across an imagined near-Eastern world, and his growing relationship with his daughter (apparently), Liesl, a novitiate nun. There are the usual Anderson-ian tropes and characters, with superb cameos by Tom Hanks, Richard Ayoade, and Benedict Cumberbatch (worth watching in itself), and a real star turn for the young Liesl, Mia Threapleton.

I first watched it on a transatlantic flight (viewer advisory: there are several scenes in rickety planes). I was hooked from the first moment. Why? Not just the usual Anderson style and panache and dead-pan weird story and acting. It was the music. Anderson himself first trained as a musician. It shouldn’t be a surprise that amidst the rest of Anderson’s meticulously designed and curated world the music should carry so much meaning.

The opening scene (no spoiler, it’s in the trailer), involves the burning wreckage of a plane (viewer advisory). There are birds – crows, hovering. And from the wreckage, bloodied but unbowed, emerges Korda. We hear from a voiceover that this is by no means the first assassination attempt he has survived. It won’t be his last. But the music at this precise point? It is a dark and brooding short melodic fragment. Does this portray a dark and brooding – evil, even – presence in the main character? Indeed, this dark melodic fragment follows Korda around the whole film, a leitmotif.

But far from it. And this is what delighted me and hooked me. Because this isn’t just any old dark and brooding melodic fragment. It is the opening notes of Stravinsky’s magnificent ballet score, his first hit for the Russian impresario in Paris, Diaghilev and his ‘Ballets Russes’, The Firebird. Now here’s the fun thing. If you know the ballet, you know that it is the magic of the firebird’s feather which brings new life out of death in the ballet’s wonderful conclusion. And that is because the Firebird story itself is based on another mythical bird-creature – the phoenix (remember the title of the movie). The mythical phoenix is a bird which cyclically dies in flames, only to be reborn from the ashes to new life. So immediately, even though all we can see is the burnt-out wreckage of a plane, what we might think to ourselves if we know our Stravinsky, is that perhaps what this melodic fragment signifies, far from a brooding menacing presence, is someone who is constantly going to reemerge from the ashes to new life. In fact, I immediately felt I would be surprised if that wouldn’t happen. Korda himself says at a certain point ‘I won’t die, I never do’. Just from a musical fragment, the whole story can be seen in one glimpse.

There are two other Stravinsky ballets which Anderson skilfully deploys (although less intrusively than the Firebird theme): the joyous whirligig of the opening of Petrushka, and the searing epilogue of the ballet Apollo. Now the Petrushka music does seem to be associated with another character, just like Firebird is associated with Korda. In the movie, Petrushka appears in two moments of significance for Liesl, (apparently) Korda’s daughter, the novitiate nun (and therefore herself already intimately associated with music – The Sound of Music). But the telling thing here is that, unlike Firebird, Petrushka (the ballet) doesn’t end well for its eponymous puppet-hero. Petrushka is killed by another puppet, with only a fleeting appearance at the end as a ghost. So the music of the ballet of Petrushka, despite the excerpt we hear being full of joyousness and innocent youthful energy, and its association with Liesl, suggests that her journey in the film is going to go in a very different direction to the convent of her initial intentions. Once again, knowing the music and the whole pattern of it can foretell an entire history that will unfold, even just from a mere fragment.

Now the next thing that is so fascinating here is the combination of Stravinsky and Wes Anderson. Stravinsky wrote several ballet scores for the ‘Ballet Russes’ and Diaghilev in the glamour of Paris of the 1920s and 1930s (amongst other famous ones are The Rite of Spring (which caused a riot), Orpheus, and Pulcinella). They are highly stylised pieces, often returning to Classical ideas and tropes (musically, as well as in theme), presenting stylised and formal dances, tableaux. And whilst all these descriptions could be applied to Anderson’s films, The Phoenician Scheme itself presents a series of quirkily introduced tableaux, with their own distinctive characters and settings. And, in the concluding scene, set in a theatre, all the characters are present all at once. A miniature mechanical device representing all of Korda’s business interests appears on a stage. And the music at that point? The opening movement of Pictures at an Exhibition (by Mussorgsky, a Russian composer from the generation before Stravinsky), music which presents its own series of musical tableaux. Artistic tableau, musical tableau, ballet, and now film presented as a series of tableaux all coming together in Anderson’s fertile imagination.

But there is one last thing that is fascinating for us in this presentation of music and art and film and plot. There is a much earlier precursor for the technique I referred to above, of one musical fragment potentially carrying with it the implication and meaning of the whole work. That earlier precursor for this technique is found in the New Testament. The authors of the New Testament, especially Paul, were saturated in the texts which we now call the Old Testament, or what they thought of as their Scriptures (just as, we might say, Anderson is clearly saturated in Stravinsky). Scholars think the New Testament writers assumed a familiarity with those Scriptures in the hearers and readers of their new writings, or, alternatively, they were helping their hearers and readers newly think and imagine along the lines set out in the Scriptures. Time and again, as Richard Hays masterfully showed (in Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels), the authors resort to a technique called metalepsis. That is, in quoting or near quoting a few words or a phrase from their Scriptures, not only are the hearers/readers meant to understand that it is a quotation, but to import the sense of the entire passage or even book from which that miniature quotation emerges. It was Richard Hays’s groundbreaking work on this literary hermeneutical aspect which caused a sensation in New Testament studies in the 1980s and 1990s when it first emerged, because it opened up whole new lines of interpretation, without any question remaining about their veracity. What it means is that, as we read the New Testament, we have constantly to be aware of what Scriptures the writer had in mind, either consciously or semi-consciously, in order to allow that thought-world to permeate our reading. It is a reminder, whatever we are reading or watching or listening to, never to be too reductive about our own cultural horizons when we approach such a text, but to be listening and open and willing to be enlarged by the life-world of the text before us, as the great philosopher Paul Ricoeur used to say.

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