The URC’s Head of Communications, Andy Jackson, takes a Christmas Day trip down memory lane.
Christmas Day was always a bit different in our household. This is because our parents worked on Christmas Day.
My father is a URC Minister, the Revd Michael Jackson. Not only was I the eldest child of the manse, but having your dad share a name with a chart-topping pop star helped and hindered at times.
For example, he always found it funny when he delivered the school assembly without warning my brother and me, and as he was walking up to the stage in the hall, hundreds of our schoolmates would turn around and say: ‘That’s your dad!’
Even worse, he made us walk to school – he didn’t even offer us a lift!
My mother was a priest too, for the Church of England. She had a calling long before she was allowed to be ordained and taught religious education at the boys’ school across the road from the church, before becoming Assistant Chaplain at the Royal Berkshire Hospital and then Chaplain after her ordination in 1994.
Because of work, Christmas Day was always spent at home (unlike the north/south divide we juggle with now), and always started by mum asking us to stop playing with the toys Santa had given us, to get dressed and to eat breakfast before going to the 9am service at Park URC, Reading (which is a much better time to have a Christmas Day service).
We’d select one toy to take to the show and tell, and we’d sing the carols with even more enthusiasm, knowing that Christmas dinner and presents would follow later.
(However, one year, the organist, Edith, didn’t play the descant to the Christmas Day verse of O Come All Ye Faithful – something which should be a crime!)
In later years, mum would go off and conduct several Christmas Day services across three hospital sites before coming home and cooking the Christmas dinner.
Church life gave us lots of traditions. The Christmas bazaar at the end of November, where we would spend hours preparing for a community event that sadly only lasted a few hours, and where the cake stall would be almost empty after 30 minutes. The
Carols by Candleight, where the late and legendary Dave Jones and others would help suspend hundreds of real candles from the sanctuary ceiling (this was before health and safety had been invented). Dulcie Payton giving us a box of homemade mince pies, the pastry of which were buttery and thick. And the generosity of church members, mainly gifts of Harvey’s Bristol Cream, which dad didn’t care for, but mum loved (and still does), and the boxes of Family Circle biscuits and All Butter Danish Cookies.
Then after the meal and the presents came the start of the long overdue and much-needed rest, and nearly every year my Uncle Peter, a church organist, and Dad, would end up asleep on the sofa. And every year, we would take photos!
The truth is that Mum and Dad had many more pastoral visits to make and services to take, additional events and meetings at the church and the hospital, as well as keeping Christmas for three children and the wider family.
They were running on fumes by Christmas Eve, and I don’t think I experienced that tiredness until I became a dad and spent many days at work after a modicum of sleep.
That’s the thing about Christmas. We forget about the reason for this wonderful, memory-filled day: a man and a woman, forced to travel 90 miles on a donkey, without the NHS to help them, and not even a heated room at the Bethlehem Travelodge, becoming parents for the first time. To Jesus!
And before your newborn is that old, you’re messaged by an angel, visited by shepherds, visited by wise men and then told to flee. I suspect Mary and Joseph would have been dazed, confused and running on fumes too.
But this is what Isaiah foresaw – regardless of the fatigue and the smell of sheep and frankincense, that a great light was coming, and in that light, a peace that has no end. Isaiah echoed the message of the angel at Bethlehem: our saviour has been born, who is Christ the Lord.
And the source of this light, God, comes into our world, not as a brilliant presence that blinds us, but as a gentle flame that draws us to him, and to one another, showing us the truth of who we really are.
I pray that your home is filled with the light and warmth that comes from Christ. Have a very happy Christmas.