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Christmas survival

17 December 2023

9 min read

Navigating your reality of Christmas

Recounting how Christmas changed for her, Lianne Howard-Dace re-evaluates the story and experiences of the season.

Lianne Howard-Dace

Lianne Howard-Dace is a writer and trainer, with a background in church and community fundraising.

A shopping street is crowded by taxi cabs and buses while above it a Christmas illumination of an angel hangs over all.

Jamie Davies, via Unsplash.

When I became a Christian thirteen years ago, I had to figure out how I might blend the sacred and the secular and rediscover what Christmas meant to me.

Each December, millions of people celebrate this occasion, without faith or religion necessarily playing a role. Nearly 90 per cent of people in the UK celebrate Christmas each year, despite only around 46 per cent of people identifying as Christians and only 5 per cent regularly attending church. These people create memories for their children because they cherish the ones their parents created for them. They decorate their house because it feels good to break up the darkness of winter with a riot of light and colour. They gather with their loved ones because it’s great to have an excuse to catch up. They eat and drink together because there are few pleasures greater than enjoying Yorkshire puddings and roast potatoes with your nearest and dearest. These experiences may even be quite spiritual, though they won’t always be recognised as such.

Of course, the secular Christmas has taken on a mythology of its own. The image I have painted above is true, but it is not the whole picture. Whatever our beliefs, we need to be careful not to make an idol of the “perfect Christmas”. Not every family can afford to eat lavishly. Not everyone has people to celebrate with. For some, late December may mark a different anniversary altogether, and be a hard time of year. Even as someone who would readily say they love Christmas, I have had my fair share of family and romantic dramas that have made some years hard.

If all you’ve ever known each Christmas is a turkey roast and visits from Santa, how can you look beyond the gift-giving and feasting which you have previously focused on, to discover the Jesus narrative within Christmas? You do not have to discard all those other things if they bring you joy, but you will start to notice that there is more going on in the marking of this holiday than you had previously considered.

Underneath the tinsel and baubles you will find Mary and Joseph in a cattle shed, with the infant Jesus lying in a manger. Perhaps there will be animals, and visitors bearing gifts as well. And you will think that you know the story. You’ll remember your role as a shepherd in a school play and playing silent night on the recorder. You’ll remember that Christmas is all about the birth of Jesus. And Jesus is the son of God, or something like that?

An all-powerful God could have revealed themselves to the world in an infinite number of ways. They could have come as a giant, towering over everyone. They could have arrived in a fiery chariot pulled by snow-leopards. They could have come riding a robot, ready to overthrow the Romans.

If the school nativity play is your primary reference point for what Christianity has to offer your life, what does it really tell you about Jesus, and why he matters? Familiarity breeds contempt. So, many people see the nativity scene year after year and dismiss it out of hand. The son of God being born as a baby 2,000 years ago is just a fairy tale. It blends in amongst the snowmen and reindeer, as just another motif of the festive season.

The nativity has become deeply sanitised and is so far removed from our modern way of life in the Global North, that for most it can be hard to see what it is trying to tell us. And if you never enter a church or meet any Christians, who is going to show you? Even as someone who was inquisitive and interested in spiritual things, for a long time, I compartmentalised the ‘churchy’ bit of Christmas as something for other people.

In looking again at Christmas I have found that yes, it tells us a lot about Jesus. But also, it tells us so much about God the Creator. An all-powerful God could have revealed themselves to the world in an infinite number of ways. They could have come as a giant, towering over everyone. They could have arrived in a fiery chariot pulled by snow-leopards. They could have come riding a robot, ready to overthrow the Romans.

But instead, at a time when 30 per cent of infants didn’t live to see their first birthday, God comes to earth as a baby. A tiny human with a soft bit on the top of his head and blurry vision, who can’t stay awake for more than an hour or so, and needs his nappy changed every half hour. That speaks to me not of a God who is far, far away in some magical realm, or a God who wants to control and oppress us, but of a God who deeply understands and respects the human experience. Who is right in the amniotic fluid, and the blood, and the crap of life, with us.

Believing that Jesus is not just the Son of God but also, somehow, Godself at the same time, can take some serious mental gymnastics when you approach it as a cerebral exercise. But when you allow yourself to see and feel the stories afresh, and ask yourself what each of them is revealing about God, God’s relationship to us and God’s relationship to our world, it can start to make an odd kind of sense.

I remember how full my heart was when I learnt that the name you’ve maybe heard Jesus called in carols – Immanuel – actually means ‘God with us’. For me, discovering this gem hidden, tucked away beneath what I thought I knew about Christmas, was extraordinary. Because, God had been with me all along.

God was with me that first disorientating Christmas after my parents’ divorce. God was with me when I was 19 and randomly went to Midnight Mass after four gin and tonics. God was with me when the dog ate our gingerbread house, roof and all. And God was with me when I laughed at my nephew trying his first Brussels sprout.

But the incarnation – the humanity of Jesus – being so pivotal to my faith, I actually find great comfort in envisaging Jesus’ birth as messy and complicated, as the rest of us.

When I think about what it means for God to become a flesh-and-blood person, I find it can be helpful to imagine the humanity of the nativity. To add a layer of realism we don’t often see. Now, I have never given birth, but unlike many childless, or childfree, people in the West, I have witnessed a birth. With the confidence gained from having endured childbirth twice already, when my mum went into labour with my brother, she refused to go to hospital. I think her exact words to my dad were, ‘The midwife can ******* come to me’.

This happened early one June morning in 1992, and I, aged six, was awoken around 6am by my mum’s screams. Going to investigate what on earth was going on, I was surprised to find my nan open the door to my parents’ bedroom. She told me that the baby was coming, and that I should go and occupy myself by getting ready for school.

Having had the birds and the bees talk at a relatively early age, I was quite keen to get a good look at what was going on. I couldn’t see much, as there were four or five adults crammed into the modest master bedroom of our terraced house. But I could see my mum in the birthing position, I could sense the intense nature of what was happening. And, even after my nan closed the bedroom door, I could hear the noises. Few on-screen depictions of birth have come close to really capturing what happened in our house that morning, even on my beloved Grey’s Anatomy.

I went downstairs to make myself a bowl of cereal. I have no idea what my then three year-old sister was up to at this point, but it’s quite possible she slept through the whole thing. After watching some classic 90s kids’ TV (Playdays, anyone?) I went and changed into my little grey skirt, white polo shirt and navy sweatshirt to get ready for school. I then went to brush my teeth, only to be confronted by a disembodied umbilical cord in our bathroom sink. I must have made a commotion at this stage, because I remember the midwife coming to explain what this peculiar mass of blood and veins and tissue was, and suggest that I brush my teeth over the bath on this occasion.

My mum couldn’t avoid hospital completely, and she and the baby went off in an ambulance; she for stitches and he for routine checks. As they were bundled off, my nan and dad came downstairs carrying the double mattress which had just welcomed my little brother into the world. It was practically soaked through and they balanced it on top of the rotary airer in our garden to dry in the spring sunshine. Of course, I delighted in the opportunity to regale my whole class with all the graphic details of this experience when I eventually arrived at school.

It seems to me that if Jesus himself is not spared a painful, bloody death, it’s unlikely to me that Mary would be spared a painful, bloody birth. Let’s not forget that the gospels were written by men, who were likely removed from the messy women’s business of birth, and perhaps wouldn’t have seen how powerful including this might have been.

Perhaps people find it respectful to narrate the birth of Christ in a clean and painless way. If Mary is the virgin mother of Christ, or even immaculately conceived herself, then surely she would’ve been spared the birth pains which Eve inflicted on her sisters? But the incarnation – the humanity of Jesus – being so pivotal to my faith, I actually find great comfort in envisaging Jesus’ birth as messy and complicated, as the rest of us. Perhaps Mary had terrible morning sickness throughout her pregnancy like my sister, perhaps Jesus was born earlier than expected like my cousin, perhaps he had the cord round his neck like me.

We can take what is good and true and life-giving from wherever we find it during the Christmas period.

It would be easy to end this article by saying that once you become a Christian and you know what Christmas is really all about, you should become worried about it being secularised and not taken seriously. You should drastically change your own behaviours and practices around Christmas. But this would miss the fact that God was already with us all along, even if we didn’t realise it.

For those of us with a foot in both camps of the sacred and secular Christmas, the journey doesn’t end when we find faith. There are certainly things we’ll want to re-evaluate - the rampant commercialism of Christmas for one thing - but we don’t need to throw the baby out with the bath water. Having unpicked what we thought we knew about the Christian Christmas, we can rebuild, reconnect and redefine what Christmas means to us now. We can create our own traditions and work out how to interweave them with those of our friends and family who may not share our faith.

I’ve never actually been to church on Christmas morning, because there are traditions in my family that I do not want to miss. The croissants and jam we eat for breakfast in our PJs every Christmas morning are a sign of God’s abundance. I will find a lull in the day, when others are snoozing or watching TV, to pray a prayer of gratitude for them. I will have spent the month leading up-to Christmas attending services and events to help me reflect on and anticipate the coming celebration of Christ’s birth. I’ll also have eaten a chocolate every day to help me count down to the day itself. And after we’ve had our Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve (very Scandinavian, I know), I will go to Midnight Mass. That is the moment when it works for me to really immerse myself in the faith aspects of Christmas.

We can take what is good and true and life-giving from wherever we find it during the Christmas period. We can celebrate loved ones reuniting, and that the days will soon become longer, not in spite of what we now know about God and Jesus, but because of it – because of the richness and new dimensions it adds to our lives. When we know that everything is a gift from God, it makes the presents our friends and family have chosen for us all the more significant, not less.

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Film & TV

Politics

Truth and Trust

13 November 2025

6 min read

The BBC and the Church of England: two giants, one crisis of trust

Will honourable resignations save the BBC—or anyone?

Tim Wyatt

Tim Wyatt is a journalist, and editor of The Critical Friend Substack.

TIm Davie, sits in an interview in front of screens showing facts about the BBC

Tim Davie, former BBC boss.

BBC.

Sometimes it seems like the BBC is never out of its own headlines. Just as one crisis is finally overcome, another erupts. This year alone we’ve seen outcry over a documentary on Gaza and the Glastonbury fiasco. Now, the broadcaster’s director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness have resigned over the latest scandal. A leaked internal dossier concluded a Panorama documentary on Donald Trump had misleadingly edited a speech he made on 6 January (it also raised questions over the BBC’s LGBT coverage and its Arabic language service).

Both Davie and Turness have insisted that the corporation is not biased in its coverage, even if mistakes had been made by its journalists and editors. But both found the pressure too much to bear. Speaking outside the BBC’s London HQ, Turness said:

“I stepped down over the weekend because the buck stops with me. But I'd like to make one thing very clear, BBC News is not institutionally biased. That's why it's the world's most trusted news provider."

She was right to identify trust as key. Can we trust the BBC to tell us what is going on in the world fairly and accurately, if it makes mistakes like these? Can we trust the individuals within the broadcaster to report the news impartially, regardless of their personal views? Indeed, can we trust those currently condemning the BBC to be acting in good faith, and not motivated by political hostility or commercial rivalry?

According to research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the BBC is the most trusted news brand in Britain, with 60 per cent of people saying they have faith in its output. Some of its newspaper antagonists can muster barely a third of that trust score. An Ofcom survey from 2019 found an impressive 83 per cent of viewers of the BBC’s TV news output trusted it to be accurate.

But trust in the media overall is slipping away in Britain. A decade ago, 51 per cent of people told the Reuters Institute they trusted the news in general; a Brexit referendum, Covid pandemic and ten years of political turmoil later, that figure is just 35 per cent.

Trust in the BBC is one of its most precious commodities, part of what helps it stand out both in Britain and globally. This is why Davie and Turness decided to fall on their swords, despite nobody suggesting they had personally done much wrong. It has to preserve the trust of its audience at all costs and the price to pay has historically been that when someone messes up, the people at the top resign. We saw the same back in 2012 when the then director general George Entwhistle quit after just 54 days in the role after the BBC got sucked into the Jimmy Savile abuse scandal. In 2004, both the director general and chair of the BBC’s board had to resign in the wake of the suicide of Iraq War whistleblower David Kelly.

This – the regular spectacle of the ‘honourable’ resignation – is an increasing rarity in other parts of public life. In our post-truth post-shame political environment, it is more common for politicians to brazen out scandal and disgrace, and rarer for their party institutions to insist leaders fall on their swords. We lost count of how many scandals Boris Johnson survived as prime minister before he was finally felled by Partygate in 2022. Across the pond, Donald Trump has effectively rendered himself uncancellable by capturing the Republican Party and much of the US media ecosystem, despite corruption and growing authoritarianism. As the Guardian columnist Marina Hyde put it, “The BBC is the last place anyone still resigns from.”

And yet. There is an interesting counter-example from another storied British public institution battling to maintain relevance in the 21st century and wracked by scandal and division: the Church of England. Just a year ago it too suffered the ignominy of seeing its leader resign in disgrace. Justin Welby was forced to quit as Archbishop of Canterbury after he was criticised in an official review over John Smyth, one of the most prolific abusers in the church’s history.

Welby painted his resignation in similar terms: an honourable act of falling on his sword to take responsibility for the institution’s broader failings. In his cloth-eared valedictory speech in the House of Lords, the outgoing Archbishop told his fellow peers that “there comes a time, if you are technically leading a particular institution, when the shame of what has gone wrong, whether one is personally responsible or not, must require a head to roll.” And in this particular case, there was only “one head that rolls well enough”, Welby added; his own.

But did this supposedly principled act of resignation rebuild trust? Not really. In fact, it may have done the opposite and further damaged the public’s trust in its national church. Welby initially hesitated and refused to resign after the damning Smyth report was first published, only agreeing to go after a weekend of simmering outrage. The vibe was less 'honourable man falling on his sword' and more 'leader convinced they’d done little wrong reluctantly forced out against their will'.

And yet with the passing of time, his resignation has become mired in regret. Growing numbers of both bishops and others in the church have questioned just how liable he really was for the failure to stop Smyth’s abuse, and how robust the Makin report’s conclusions are. There is an increasing sense Welby was forced out in a rush to find a scapegoat, any scapegoat, to stem the bleeding and show that the church was taking it seriously.

His successful defenestration has radicalised the more hardline elements of the abuse survivor movement, encouraging them to try to topple their other despised enemies within the church hierarchy. Bishops now fear they will be next on the chopping block, regardless of their culpability; unsurprisingly this does not engender greater trust. In fact, many observers would suggest trust between the bishops and those in the pulpits and pews has never been lower in modern times. The tortured attempt to introduce blessings for gay couples has poisoned the well further, contributing to the system for appointing new bishops to begin to break down. Somehow, both the liberal and the conservative wings of the Church feel equally betrayed by the bishops’ actions during the gay blessings saga.

Trust is slowly earned, and quick to drain away. Even doing the honourable thing and resigning is no longer a surefire route to restore trust in our public institutions. Just as with Welby, it is likely these BBC resignations will not rebuild confidence in our national broadcaster. Instead, they may well further encourage the right-wing press and demagogues like Trump to scream “fake news” and hector impartial news outlets further. The resignations also tell the ordinary viewer and listener the accusations of bias must be true – otherwise why would these bigwigs have to stand down?

There are no easy lessons to read across from the Church of England’s battle to regain trust to the BBC. For years now bishops have been urging clergy and lay people to try to trust them once more, to put aside defensiveness and hostility and work together in vulnerable collaboration. And things have mostly only got worse. Trust cannot be willed back into existence, nor will it return through the bloodletting of high-profile ‘honourable’ resignations.

In fact, there’s a deeper problem which goes much further than the BBC or the Church of England. A deeper crisis of trust in society at large. For 25 years the Edelman Trust Barometer has been measuring societies around the world, and of 28 nations polled last year the UK’s average trust score was rock bottom: just 39 per cent of people on average said they trusted businesses, the government, or the media. In fact, almost everywhere people are running low on trust. Fears that government leaders and media elites purposely lie to us are at an all-time high. Until we can find ways to rebuild the ties that bind us, as individuals and communities, it is hard to see how the large institutions that used to shape British civic life – whether that is the BBC, the Church or parliament – can regain the public’s trust, resignations or no resignations.

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