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

Books

Culture

29 April 2024

6 min read

Are we being anxious about anxiety?

Haidt's diagnosis of a 'doomed' youth is off. Instead, we should learn from them.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A child sits atop a bunk bed holding a phone in front.

It’s common these days to hear about social anxiety, health anxiety, or climate anxiety – but I think I can see that a new pathology is beginning to emerge: anxiety anxiety. This is where parents, politicians, academics, or just members of society in general, start to get anxious about the fact that everybody is anxious. Diagnosis rates of clinical anxiety have shown a steep increase in the past decade, and numbers, we assume, don’t lie.

Of the many outcomes of ‘anxiety anxiety’, one is going to be people who (with the absolute best intentions) want to suggest solutions. One such person is Jonathan Haidt, with his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

From the spaceman on the cover to the opening vignette about sending our children to Mars, Haidt’s premise is clear: smartphones are the alien invaders of our society. These electronic parasites are feasting on the brain matter of our young people, directly causing what is now an epidemic of clinical anxiety and depression.

I’m quite ready to read a sensible analysis of the impact of smartphone culture on mental health, so I was disappointed to find that Haidt’s book falls so far short of that. From a scientific perspective, the argument is a barrage of statistics, arranged to the tune of ‘correlation equals causation’. Given Haidt’s seniority in his field, this approach is surprisingly unsubtle, something which has already been heavily criticised by peer review. Numbers, it seems, do lie – or at least they can be easily curated to prove your point.

But even if we accept Haidt’s point – which is that rates of smart-phone use (particularly social media) and rates of young people being diagnosed with anxiety disorders have increased over the same time period – what can be done? Haidt’s solution is to ban young people from owning smartphones at all until the age of 14, and from using social media until the age of 16, or even better 18. In this way, owning and managing one’s own device and its access becomes a rite of passage into adulthood. But note: whilst parents are urged to implement these unyielding boundaries for their children’s device-habits, Haidt does not ask grown-ups to make any changes to their own. Adults can continue with their current norms of smartphone use, ostensibly because their brains are fully developed, and they therefore have the maturity to handle their own risk to mental health.

Smartphones are not aliens – they were designed by humans, and are willingly bought by humans, in response to the human need to communicate.

Of course, it does not suit Haidt’s argument to analyse why adult mental health is also seeing an increase in diagnosis of anxiety disorders. It may be true to say that rates are rising more quickly amongst young people, but there is still no consensus as to how much of that can be attributed to young people simply being better informed about mental health and more empowered to seek help than the generations before them. Noticeably, young people today have a language to talk about anxiety that simply didn’t exist when I was a teenager in the 1990s, and ironically enough, it is social media that has made that possible. Although suicide rates are on the rise, they are still quite significantly lower among young people than they are for those aged over 35, and it should be noted that a proven pathway to suicide prevention amongst young people is access to self-help via smartphone apps.

So whilst I am quite ready to believe that smartphone culture is one of many factors impacting the health and wellbeing of young people today, I think characterising smartphones as alien invaders, or as invasive parasites that have been selectively bred by Silicon Valley billionaires to infest the minds of our young people, seems to be a disingenuous response – and one that only serves to increase parental anxiety by implying that smartphones are sly, sentient beings, and out of our control.

Smartphones are not aliens – they were designed by humans, and are willingly bought by humans, in response to the human need to communicate and a perfectly natural human desire to seek out entertainment and culture. True, technology and software are developed by billionaires, and marketing and algorithms can influence our choices – but at the end of the day, any developer will tell you that products only ever evolve in response to what the market demands. Adults: we have the money in our pockets; we are the market.

As a more empathetic and intelligent generation, it seems they could probably teach us a few things about how to harness smartphone culture.

In other words, we (the adults) selectively bred these ‘aliens’ ourselves – and rather than try (and no doubt fail) to lock up our experiment in a lab (or, as Haidt suggests, a lockable phone-pouch) we, the adults, have more than enough agency to continue that process of developing smartphones into devices that meet needs and provide entertainment in the way that they were always meant to do. In his defence, Haidt does refer to this approach briefly, but still only with a view to making the phones be for ‘us’ (the adults) and not ‘them’ (the young people) by removing content that appeals to a younger audience. To me feels like we are victim shaming the youth of today for the fact that they have inherited a problem created by their parents.

One day when Jesus was teaching a crowd of followers, he advised them “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own?” His point was about hypocrisy – it is far easier to judge someone else’s behaviour than it is to take responsibility for our own. Where did any of us last read or hear terrifying information about the decline in young people’s mental health? Was it on our smartphones?

Here are a few things that Haidt’s selection of statistics doesn’t say about the youth of today. They are the most compassionate and empathetic generation that we have seen for decades (Konrath et. al., 2023). They are able to wait longer for rewards than their parent’s generation (Protzko, 2020), they are also less lazy, less narcissistic, more cooperative and more intelligent (Kriegel, 2016). In addition, whilst obvious damage is done by ‘filters’ on Instagram photos, making some young people strive for unattainable standards of beauty, it was the previous generation of smartphone users who began this trend, and it is the current generation of young people who can be credited with the #nofilter #nomakeup countertrends. This same generation is now fuelling the rise of insurgent social media sites such as Bereal, which emphasise the importance of authentic photos and meaningful connection with friends online.

Overall, perhaps instead of restricting and controlling our young people’s online lives, as Haidt would have us do, we ought to be talking to them? As a more empathetic and intelligent generation, it seems they could probably teach us a few things about how to harness smartphone culture and develop it towards solutions to the problems that we ourselves created.