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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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Biology

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Wildness

10 July 2025

5 min read

There’s a sting in the tail if we construct lessons from nature

Don’t be like the bees

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

A bee keeper hold honeycomb to the light

HiveBoxx on Unsplash.

‘Be like the bees’ we hear not infrequently. These furry hive dwellers have been coopted by many, from socialists to capitalists, to put a point across. One party draws on their social structure as an inspiration, another their worker bee ethic. They are indeed an example to us. And yet at the same time, bee communities do things that we would find reprehensible in fellow humans. Male bees are expelled from the hive when they are no longer considered reproductively useful. The bees we see out and about this summer are often the oldest, sent to do the dangerous foraging work because they are considered the most expendable. This was a jarring discovery for me, reading it in Katherine May’s timely book, Wintering, during the first COVID-19 lockdown. I was one of the millions shielding and being protected by the ways that society shifted to serve the most vulnerable to the virus; bees, I had just learned, would not behave like this. There are some limits, it seems, to the lessons we construct from nature.

For we do love to construct them. Spend a moment on LinkedIn or Substack, and there are a multitude of articles drawing lessons from the world around us and the creatures we share it with.

This impulse is not new; throughout history, people and communities have done this. People’s relationship with nature is not static or homogenous. The wilderness has been variously a place of fear to be avoided, of growing wonder as described by the Romantic Poets, a site of knowledge neglected by those in power but maintained by others, often women and indigenous communities.

What strikes me about the current trend is that it seems to push to an extreme of unquestioning veneration: nature is perfect and our whole teacher. There are posts about perfect harmony we should emulate, or a call to copy an endless adaptability. These are the things that we might long for – but do not seem to be borne out in ecosystems where sea urchins demolish kelp forests, and the climate crisis reveals the limits of species to adjust. We are being called to see what we want (or feel we need) rather than what actually exists in the world around us.

This instinct to carve lessons from creation extends beyond the natural world to the work of human hands. The Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with gold, has become increasingly prevalent as a metaphor for healing; a beautiful idea but one that risks being stripped of its culture, and that has both limitations and dangers. In Sarah Perry’s novel, The Essex Serpent, Cora’s husband Michael masks his abuse by speaking in a romantic metaphor of his intention to break her down and mend her with gold, like the Japanese art in their hallway. But Cora is not a vase; she is woman. Michael’s breaking harms her. She only begins to repair after he is gone; it is messy, some parts seem irrevocably changed. I think of my own losses, and how healing is indeed available, but rarely as straightforward as putting the same pieces back together. To think it is so can hinder our restoration, and miss out on the transformation that may be possible. As the journalist Poorna Bell wrote after her husband’s death by suicide: “I was in some ways sadder, wiser, but also my existence was much bigger, more honest.”

We have a great capacity to learn – and we need it to survive. As writer Andy Crouch put it in his book, Culture Making: “a human baby is the strangest and most wonderful creature this world can offer. No other mammal emerges so helpless from the womb, utterly unable to cope with the opportunity and adversity of nature. Yet no other creature holds such limitless possibility… We are hard-wired for nothing but learning. All we begin with are possibilities.”

This ability to grow and understand and change is essential if we are to navigate the world. And in our encounters with this place, with brokenness and confusion, the instinct to make meaning, to tidy, to be able to point to something and say 'this is how we should be’ is a form of comfort. Maybe even control it. We are grappling with not just how to understand the world, but how to be in it.

If we are always looking for the lesson, we devalue nature by prizing it just for what it can give us.

Creation and creativity have much to teach us – they’re a testament to and the fruit of the imagination of God. But to prize them just for their lessons seems to fall into another form of extraction and to miss out on something else, something that may be a greater gift in this messy world: wonder.

Bees moving from flower to flower are not setting out on their mission with a side hustle of education for the human race. They are being their full bee selves. Nectar is necessary; this is how it is collected. Bees share knowledge about the good plants via a ‘waggle dance’. This is how the colony persists. It is not for my benefit (though it may encourage me to a moment of playfulness).

Writing this on my balcony, I pause when I see dozens of birds circling one thermal; a moving column of gulls and red kites that goes up and up and up. I could strive for a teachable moment (maybe something about co-existence?) but it feels not just unnecessary, but an interruption. In that moment, I was a human being in awe of birds riding the warm air; that feels like something full of beauty in itself. I worry that if we are always looking for the lesson, we devalue nature by prizing it just for what it can give us. And we miss out on the opportunities to marvel at creation itself.

And, in calling each other to be like other creatures, we accidentally dehumanise other people and ourselves. In the face of conflict, polarisation and disconnection, to contend for each other’s humanity feels vital. And to recognise our own humanness is to acknowledge our limitations. There are parts of nature currently beyond our comprehension. Birdsong holds complexity heard by the intended audience but we can only guess at its meaning. There is something to accepting the edges of our own understanding. Sometimes we touch on truths that seem to contradict or be in tension. Perhaps they are layers that we cannot intellectually fit together but that build up a fuller, richer story that resonates in our souls. Glimpsing something of the multifaceted wisdom and wonder of God himself – and that helps us to remember who we are. A particular type of creature: a human.

So, I won’t be a bee. I’ll keep trying to learn to be what I am: a particular human in a bigger community, world and story. Now, I’m off to admire the goldfinches, glinting in the sunshine.

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