I decided that this Christmas I was going to get my daughters a nativity set for Christmas. I don’t want them growing up believing that Christmas is a commercial holiday celebrating presents, food and sleeping in because all the building contractors have buggered off for the month. Although the above is all true, they do learn all about as many other religions as their multi cultural / racial /ethnic nursery school can cram into the year. Elizabeth is always coming home to tell me that she has tried samoosas / kitke / halva / lebkuchen for Eid / Diwali / Hannukkah or Easter, so I feel it is important for her to be able to speak with authority about Christmas at the next show and tell. I also remember spending hours re-arranging the nativity set as a child, sending the shepherds off to their field on the couch so that the angel could make the aerial approach over the back of the sofa and give them a fright. There is nothing like a bit of role playing to cement key concepts into a child’s mind.
So my mother tells me that she has definitely seen a nativity set at the Christian Book Store in the Fourways Mall. I rush off there, secure in the knowledge that although the rest of Fourways Mall will be heaving two saturdays before Christmas, the Christian Bookshop will be a haven of deserted calm. The nativity set in question is on a display table at the entrance but I quickly spot that it is missing the manger. I check the barn, but it is empty except for the donkey, I check Mary but she is not holding him, I check Joseph and I check the angels in case one of them is babysitting for Mary while she has a quick nap. Nothing, the Baby Jesus and his manger are AWOL. I point this out to the shop assistant and she looks at me as if I were asking Father Christmas to bring me one of the moons of Saturn. I ask the manager and she tells me that since it is incomplete I can have the set for R150 instead of the full R200. She seems quite surprised that I don’t leap at this once in a lifetime offer!
Now I do realise that the majority of the Christian World quite happily celebrates Christmas without a thought for the Baby Jesus, in fact most of the planet celebrates Christmas no matter what religion they actually are. (The most beautiful decorations on my Christmas tree come from Dubai and are large three dimensional stars painted in intricate and elaborate Islamic patterns – nobody can do bling quite like Dubai.) But the point of a nativity set is to instruct children in the sequence of events and the key players in an important episode of a Major World Religion, without the Central Figure of the above MWR we really are only dealing with a bit of livestock, some angels on holiday and members of a distant royal family slumming it around Palestine.
Having lost the Baby Jesus, Christmas is increasingly beginning to feel like a fairly empty holiday. Here I am sitting in the semi darkness, with the Christmas tree lights on and my feet on the dog. Although I have a very pretty Christmas tree this year (my daughters decorated it under my heavy supervision) and the dog is nice and soft, I am feeling profoundly depressed and lonely. It could be because it is too hot tonight to have one’s feet on a hot furry body, or because I don’t actually like having my feet licked, or it could be because I have a growing awareness that Christmas is slowly reverting to it’s ancient and pagan origins as a midwinter festival which is therefore totally meaningless in the Southern Hemisphere summer. How does one celebrate midsummer in a country that has a perfect climate all year round? The summer solstice is just another bloody fabulous day in Africa.
Of course friends and family have let us down (or have we let them down?). My friends (without children) are going to Uganda in search of gorillas, (not the lost Baby Jesus,) my sister couldn’t afford the flights over from the USA in December, my in laws are avoiding their children this year by escaping to friends in a remote location known only to themselves and my mother announced that after decades of pandering to tradition she is cooking prawns for Christmas Lunch because I’m the only person who likes turkey and now that I am 40 and she is 70 and I can bloody well do without it. The Nursery School cancelled the Carols by Candlelight on the grounds that having an outdoor evening function during thunderstorm season on the Highveld was asking for trouble and our Office Christmas Party was renamed the “End Of Year Lunch” in case we offended the one Muslim, the one Hindu and the one Jehovah’s Witness in the office. We don’t have any Jewish people or Scorpios in our office – the Employment Equity Committee pointed out to us that unless we actually employ people who are born in October and November we will have to cancel the monthly birthday tea in November because of lack of representation. Our token Muslim is actually a blond boy who married a Muslim girl and converted to Islam and our resident Hindu sings in a band at any party that will give them a gig.
So, on the one hand Christmas is becoming eroded because we are now completely inclusive and tolerant of other religions and cultures, and on the other hand Jesus would be delighted that we have all stopped fighting and are embracing each others cultures and eating each others food instead. The lines between Hannukkah, Diwali and Christmas, all festivals of illumination celebrating the triumph of light over darkness, are becoming blurred in all the candlelight. So in the true spirit of Christmas I am going to annoy my father as much as I can this year by baking Stollen and Lebkuchen for Christmas. If my mother is not doing a turkey I can also break out and bake German instead of Greek.
Fabulous rave! (The Christian book stores in this part of the world are called CUM. No kidding.)