Out and about lately, people have been stopping me and talking about those awful scenes of consumer frenzy on Black Friday, bewailing the lack of Christmas spirit – sad face – and appealing to me for some kind of ecclesiastical endorsement of their seasonal rectitude. But I don’t want to give it. First, it’s not Christmas, it’s Advent, in which anxiety and challenge are principal themes; second, because Christ was born into a world of human reality, of strife and competition and acquisitiveness and the meanness of spirit with which we look down on those whose behaviour we deplore without much effort to understand it, a fact very often overlooked in a secular world that fancies my world offers a cosy mulled-wine-and-candlelight refuge from the harsh realities that the braver and wiser endure.
It is a season of peculiar shifts of mood and tone. Carol services start earlier and earlier – this year I hearkened to the herald angels and looked out on the Feast of St Stephen before World Aids Day (1 December) – and I expect by the time we get to Midnight Mass the evergreen appeal of carols may have wilted a little.
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