[15] 103 God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

'Now to the Lord sing praises,
All you within this place,
And with true love and brotherhood
Each other now embrace;
This holy tide of Christmas
All anger should efface:
O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy!
O tidings of comfort and joy!'

I’ll hide my light under no bushel: IT’S MY BIRTHDAY TODAY! My 21st, in fact. Quite a milestone – and as soon as midnight struck I felt instantly older, wiser, and more mature… OK so that isn’t really true, as my use of the CAPS LOCK key probably proves. Perhaps I should wait for the precise time of my birth, at 07:20, and then I’ll feel the click-over from one age to the next… although I’m not holding out much hope to be honest. Maybe it’s something to do with leap years, variance of the Earth’s magnetic pole, or perhaps I should be measuring by the Lunar Calendar, but birthdays are never as momentous as you might expect.

Thinking about it; a ‘year’ is a wholly human division of time, and almost arbitrary. There is little to link 15th December 1989 to 15th December 2010. There’s nothing intrinsically fifteen-y about today, no essential or fundamental component of this 24-hour period which marks it as sole successor to the previous period we labelled ‘15/12’. Why, then, we attach such importance to anniversaries and birthdays is beyond me. Someone somewhere decided that, since there are roughly 365(ish!) revolutions of Earth for each time the Earth travels around the Sun, we should create the year. However, Earth is not at precisely the same spot every time we hit 15/12, since the Sun itself is travelling through the galaxy. My point is that calendars are imperfect; a mere labelling tool. God does not work to diurnal, traditional or even metric systems of measuring time and date.

Does this render Christmas just another arbitrary date? Frankly yes, in my view at least. On top of calendric inaccuracies, a huge church calendar change in the 16th Century, and inconsistency of application; the Bible gives no date for the birth of Christ. After this rant, please now allow me to take a long way round finding my way back to where we were at the start. That’s how these blog things seem to go, isn’t it?

My friend’s birthday is the 14th of December, and as such we tend to be together when one date clicks over into the next. Last night, our circle of friends had a party; lots of food, a few drinks, catching up and generally being silly. This, as always, was a really warm event – a group of people genuinely enjoying each other’s company and having fun, to celebrate two birthdays shared.

This kind of event is exactly what the carol writer had in mind when they wrote the verse above. In the line ‘this holy tide of Christmas’, ‘tide’ means ‘greeting’, referring to the embracing in love of lines 3-4. The atmosphere it espouses is one of, well, comfort and joy; the rousing jollity of parties and the deep expression of friendship.

I know only too well the feeling of your birthday being engulfed by Christmas music, tinsel, and having to book meals in advance and choose from the ‘Festive Menu’. Even yesterday someone suggested that we should celebrate my birthday by clubbing in Christmas fancy-dress. Imagine how much worse this is for Christ! Every birthday is a full month or more of giddy excitement and the only telly he can watch is children’s films and the Queen’s Speech. Families across the nation will be settling down to unwrap presents and eat the one meal of the year which is at the table, whilst largely ignoring the birthday-boy.

Somehow I don’t think he’d mind. If this carol is anything to go by, lines 5 and 6 show beautifully how relaxed Christmas should be. Yuletide greetings of love ‘all anger should efface’ – this means that every annoyance and niggle should be wiped out, at least for this one day. Even if dates have little meaning, even if we’re out of sync with the solstice, we have made this commitment to love. How glorious is it that we can set aside one day of the year when we can share tidings of comfort and joy with our families and friends! Thanks be to God!