So I propose looking at two statements that we hear over and over again about Christmas and see whether they have some kind of religious valence. The first is: "Christmas is For Families". The second is: "Christmas is For Children". So, I would like to take them in turn. The first one is in a sense easier to dispatch because I think that the experience of most of us is that, although we may want to turn into The Waltons on December 25^th, we continue to be The Simpsons most of the time. It really doesn’t work most of the time. We don’t suspend history for that 24 hour period one day a year, so that all the hurts and disappointments and frustrations and offences that have made up so much of our living, whether intentional or unintentional, can simply disappear, evanesce, only to magically to reappear on December 26^th fully invigorated. It does not work. It does not work for a number of reasons some of them extraordinarily important. I think it does not work first of all, and this has religious significance, because we expect the family to do what only God can do: to love us as we are. Because the fact is, none of us know who we are or who the other is. Even with the best intention in the world we want to love, yet we constantly miss each other.

And so it is possible to look at Christmas as a time to twig our memories that "Ah yes only God can do that, only God knows who I am". But there is another level of significance in that phrase "Christmas is Family Time" that is even more directly related to the feast. And we can approach that by asking: who is my family? This is a matter that was addressed over and over to Jesus. Your mother and your brothers are looking for you. And Jesus said "Who are they? Who are my mother, my brother and my sister?" It is scary slightly to see how consistently Jesus downplays the significance of the biological unit we call the family. It is something else that is supposed to connect me to other people. You hear the word of God and you live it. That is my family. There is something even more going on in this notion of the family. The way that Jesus himself had in mind in discounting, in a certain way, the biological family, was to say: I am brother to everyone. Everyone is my family. And this is really important, especially in the latter part of the 20^th century, where the family is clearly beleaguered. There are even some people who are proposing that the family is passé. This tight little island that we attempt to erect in a fundamentally inhospitable world. At least that is the way it seems. Where we erect bulwarks against all those outsiders in order to protect ourselves. What happens with Jesus is that he says "no, you have to look at this all over again. The family is everybody". And so, when we say that Christmas is a family celebration, that is religiously significant. But we very badly need to know what we mean when we say "the family".

The second item is a little more problematic: Christmas is for children. What does that mean? I think it means that we would like to shut off the harsh realities of life as we know it and to say that Walt Disney had it right. Everybody is young, everybody is beautiful, everything can be set to music and it will all end happily. There are no sharp edges in life. It is basically rock candy mountain if we only awaken to the fact. Christmas is for children. The problem here is similar to the problems we saw in Christmas being for the family. But the biggest problem is that it infantilises us. Life is not simply a non-stop satisfaction of our appetites, whatever they are, and should not be. And if they were, imagine what we would all look like. We would have a worse time getting on with each other than we already do. All you have to do is examine the world’s landscape to see how badly we are bringing that off. Again Oscar Wilde’s great remark about there being two sadness’ in life: one is not getting everything you want and the second is getting everything you want, is very much to the point. So, is there any way we can rescue that notion of Christmas being a suspension of reality for one day, a kind of soft edged and highly unreal view of things? Here too we can appeal to the New Testament, because over and over again we have this mysterious language: like "unless you become like a child you cannot enter the Kingdom of God". What does that mean? Has Jesus out-Disneyed Disney in making that proposal? I don’t think so. The Gospels are neither for, by or about children. So somehow Jesus is making that statement to adults and therefore calling on adults to reflect about what there is about being a child that we have lost. And I think that it is true to say that one of things that children do with infinitely greater ease and grace than the rest of us do is simply to take everybody as they are. This is embedded in all kinds of fairy tales The Emperor’s New Clothes is my favourite instance of that clear sightedness of children. And the capacity of children to accept anyone regardless of gender or colour or language, simply as another person.

Growing up, of course, involves constructing a filtration system. These not these. And so, the demolition of that filtration system is very much to the point for us today. Yes, Christmas can be a children’s thing if we know what we are talking about; if we are not talking about the infantilisation of our lives. As a footnote, the problem here is that often enough that the Church has been guilty of that telling us that the only thing we need to learn is to obey. This is, of course, what you need to teach a little kid. At least for a while. So, Christmas can be for children if we understand this as meaning the re-appropriation of that capacity not to discriminate on all kinds of grounds, like wardrobe, income, level of intelligence, colour or language and if you see everybody else as simply another human being to whom I am called, and for whose presence I must make room in my heart.