What Christmas Presence?

LET US PRAISE. Up, on your feet. Now stretch out your arms, hands straight. Imagine that the span of evolution runs from left to right across your body, beginning at your left fingertip. From there, on a human-scale timeline running across your torso as far as your right elbow, this planet contains nothing but bacteria. On across the right arm with simple creatures. The dinosaurs don't appear until the middle - wait for it - of your right palm. The whole story of homo erectus and homo sapiens is contained in the thickness of a single nail-clipping.

Now let Richard Dawkins, from whose book Unweaving the Rainbow I took this analogy, complete it: 'As for recorded history; as for the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Jewish patriarchs, the dynasties of Pharaohs, the legions of Rome, the Christian Fathers, the Laws of the Modes and the Persians which never change; as for Troy and the Greeks, Helen and Achilles and Agamemnon dead; as for Napoleon and Hitler, the Beatles and Bill Clinton, they and everyone that knew them are blown away in the dust from one light stroke of a nail-file.'

Awesome, isn't it? That is scale. That is real. That is something to gape about. Awe is the great spiritual emotion and, in an irreligious age, perhaps Dawkins's scientific imagination hints at where the human race will go to find it.

Faith recedes. In a year, according to one analysis, more people visit Canterbury Cathedral as tourists than worship in an Anglican church. Picture our mid-winter festival, a century or two from now. Solemnly, in traditional families, they stand and make the Dawkins cross and repeat his incantation. There is time for the ancient songs, such as Imagine'. (Except in Scotland, where they sing the mysterious 'Ye Canna Push Yer Granny off a Bus', thought to refer to a long-forgotten funeral rite.) The square, glowing box representing 'teevee', an emblem of warmth and family, is lit up and hung from the ceiling.

Well, it will not be like that. If this archipelago is still above water in 2200, its people may be Hindu, shamanist or Christian Orthodox rather than Darwinist, for all we really know. Christmas has changed so much that the only safe assumption is a future festival which has discarded some rituals and created others. A quick accounting of the current festival would include the fixing of Christ's nativity on 25 December, dating back to a certain Philocalus in Rome in 354 - a bit late, one would have thought, for accurate remembering - the general feasting habit, originating from ancient Syrian cults and maybe earlier still; turkeys, from the late 1700s; Christmas trees, popular here from the 1850s; Christmas cards (Henry Cole, 1843); greeting the New Year drunk in Trafalgar Square, which dates back to expatriate London Scots in the Twenties; the James Bond film, from the Seventies;

and the annual Daily Mail article about how politically-correct Americans are destroying Christmas (Nineties onwards, but watch that space). We pick some rituals, distort others and junk still more - no mumming now, no wassail bowls, no wren-killing, no plum porridge, no misrule beating of schoolmasters by their pupils.

As Ronald Hutton relates In his book on the British ritual year, The Stations of the Sun, complaining that Christmas is over-commercialised is also a tradition: in 1897 George Bernard Shaw was complaining that the festivity was forced by shopkeepers and journalists on 'a reluctant and disgusted nation'.

Christmas isn't 'essentially pagan' as someone will assert in the next few days, or even 'fundamentally Christian' as a bishop will riposte; for most of us, it is the accumulation of memories and habits we have ended up with in any one particular year. But there are good reasons to reflect on the post-Christian, stressed, consumer festival it has become. To enjoy it properly it ought to be also a time of awe, praise, pity and other words the irreligious age recoils from.

This millennium, in particular, is a moment to remember the extraordinary change in our understanding of time and scale. We can assume that in prehistoric societies, marking the winter solstice,'time' in our sense was meaningless. Scale was measured by a human life and by the seasons: there was little history, no thinkable future.

For early Christians, the life of Jesus seemed relatively recent and his return not so distant either. Time was longer, but encompassed by the written bistory of the Old Testament and a brisk, pre-apocalypse future. By the time Christmas was reinvented as a family festival in the Industrialised societies, biblical events had receded and some awareness that the Earth was far older was spreading. Today, In a post-Darwin, post-Einstein society, time and space have exploded in size.

Instead of standing at the still, silent point of the year, affirming God and Nature in the darkness, we are aware of accelerating through evolution and civilisation at a terrifying pace. We know we are recent. We know we are reshaping the climate very quickly, all the 'hottest’ statistics were there again in the press last week. And we know that our celebration is at odds with what we know.

For instance, I cannot be the only one who looks out at a hotter, .gustier Britain) the South of which has not seen a real snowfall for many Decembers and finds the scenes on Christmas cards (snowmen,the frozen Thames) unsettling rather than reassuring. I am not the only one who ponders this family festival in a country where the family is shrinking in size and its atomisation drives the demand for a million new homes.

And others, surely, also tramp home at night thinking of the candle ceremonies, the old huddling-together in the icy dark, and then look up to see not stars and darkness, but the constant orange waxy glow of the urban sky. Christmas was invented by a scattered humanity whose globe, missing the sun's light, was black. Today, from space Europe is a fizzy splatter of night-light.

Then there is the feasting, the buying, the orgiastic consumption. For people who went short through the dark months, it must have been wonderful, a truly emotional moment. Increasingly, however, we ask what is the point of a once-a-year celebration of consumption and excess in a society entirely dedicated to those broad-buttocked deities month in, month out? So, each Christmas, we eat too much, drink too much and buy too much. So just what makes December different?

A festival of religion, darkness, cold, family and rare excess in a country which has lost its religion, is brightly lit, whose climate is warming and whose consumer population increasingly lives alone. No wonder some of us feel uneasy. I know this the complaint of the modem Scrooge, the faithless party-pooper. When the Christmas tree limits are on, a good whisky is flooding through me and the family are near, these misgivings melt briefly away. The spirit of solidarity and the sense of awe are not quite dead.

But what are rituals and festivals for if not provoking us to think? I am not proposing the kind of 'Darwinmass' celebration satirised at the beginning of this column; it smells too much of the filled, faked rituals of French revolutionaries. But I want more from Christmas than nostalgia, unease and a swollen liver. Pagans took their sun-worshipping entirely seriously. Good Christians feel the same about these weeks. But what about the rest of us? Where is our seriousness? Are we left with nothing but irony and Visa bills?

In a post-religious society, we need to exercise a sense of awe that is connected to our understanding, as Dawkins does,

When he celebrates the scale of time and the intricate beauty of evolved nature. That in turn may lead to a new ethical imagination, which focuses more on our duties to the planet, which allows us to think longer ahead. It may lead to a sensibility which is less grossly material and a little more dignified.

We need to find ways to tackle the ethical questions around us, from the Bulger killers' future to abortion, in language that does not rely entirely on Judeo-Christian hand-me-downs. Awe, praise, moral argument: those are what the loss of faith has hollowed out. Christmas won't be Christmas until we win them back.

Andrew Marr

The Observer 27 December 1999