Kneeling

First published in Column 8 on the 22^nd December, 1992

Welcome to Christmas 1992!

Squabbling city councillors, silly-walking Parliamentarians squeezing through last minute legislation. Endless ignorable junk-mail (sorry, direct marketing promotions); loot and lotto-buying foot-sore shoppers; harassed retailers, credit-card consuming, even greed-encouraging.

Welcome to Arkwright-like shops open at all hours – even unto the hour of midnight thereof. Only Christmas Day remains as an oasis of peace in the middle of the restless seas of retailing. Restless, and desiring even to eat up Christmas Day itself.

Soup-kitchens galore for the poor. Deadline-meeting columnists. Welcome to Christmas 1992!

Finnish women’s organisations say children may find Mother Christmas less scary than Santa Claus. They believe Santa should have a female companion who could take his sleigh and reindeer around the world delivering presents. ‘That would be really equality,’ Ms Leena Ruusuvuori said.

Mother Christmas? I bet there’ll be no climbing down chimneys for her – she’ll just want to drive the sleigh. (Anyway, the only chimney now left in our house is a flue, so no roly-poly Mother or Father Christmas is going to make their way down that.)

And no thumping down on the roof for Mother Christmas, with reindeer hooves scratching the paint work. She’ll drive her vehicle up the road at a respectable hour (while the kids are still up), and they’ll be able to come and grab their goodies straight off the sleigh. Forget all that masculine mystery and excitement. Trouble is, Mother Christmas sounds like a door-to-door saleswoman, to me.

Welcome to Christmas 1992!

Let’s forget all the bustle and hassle and do a bit of contemplating, in keeping with the reason for the season.

We used to have a picture on our living-room wall which hung there, not just at Christmas, but all year round. It was a very simple picture of the aforesaid Father Christmas, and put him perfectly in place.

In the picture he was kneeling at the foot of a cradle. The cradle contained the Christ child, and Father Christmas was kneeling in adoration, a smile full of wonder on his face. He was worshipping the greatest Christmas gift of all: Jesus Christ.

You’ll have noticed in the rush and confusion described above that there wasn’t a lot of kneeling going on (unless one happens to be a shoe salesperson). Yet in the Christmas story kneeling is kept in focus.

First there was a group of smelly shepherds, straight from the fields and from sleeping right amongst the sheep, dags ground into their woolly jackets and breeches, and without a deodorant to roll between them.

They’d heard the message from a rather unusual source, and came and found the baby lying in the animals’ feeding trough. And they knelt in adoration. For one thing, this child was the son of their shepherd King, David. But the angels had told them more: this child was the Son of God, and was His gift to a pain-filled world.

And at some later point, wise men from the East appeared (we don’t even know what made them ‘wise’), with gifts for this ordinary-looking baby. They were foreigners, aliens, non-Jews, despised Gentiles – just like you and me. And they too knelt in adoration.

This Christmas, as we kneel beside the pine-smelling tree, putting presents under it; or maybe as we kneel beside an excited child opening a precious package; or maybe as we kneel to clean leftovers off the floor, we could let our knees remind us, hopefully for more than a moment, why we celebrate Christmas at all.

There are now dozens of versions of Santa kneeling before Jesus. Many of them get it just right; some go overboard. None that I’ve seen so far are quite like the picture I was talking about, but I’ve included one above that fits the bill - sorry, can't tell you who the artist is.