The irony of our Decembers

I have a friend who once told me that, in the course of daily life, she frequently imagines what it would be like to be a medieval peasant. We all have our quirks, I guess.

Sometimes she makes the comparison in order to make her feel better about life now, as a kind of internal pep talk: ‘Think life is hard? Think how much harder it would be if you were a medieval peasant!’ Other times the comparison is more negative: ‘Life would be much simpler if I were a medieval peasant.’ Fewer decisions to make and a lot less to do, at least at this time of year: medieval winter is surely just a case of looking at an empty field and hoping your supply of turnips or whatever lasts you until Spring. No Sunday School nativity plays or ‘Oh help, it’s Christmas jumper day tomorrow’ moments.

That’s not to say that our medieval forebears didn’t know how to do Christmas. I’ve listened to precisely one episode of the BBC history podcast ‘You’re Dead to Me’ on the subject and now I’m practically an expert. Rather than have everything leading up to ‘the big day’ – which often, if we’re honest, falls short of expectations – they had a sombre Advent followed by a full 12 days of Christmas, plenty of mummers, Yule logs, and more spices than you can shake a stick at.

The medieval Christmas tradition that has most caught my attention is that of the ‘Boy Bishop’. A lucky lad was selected from among the choristers to preside over the cathedral from the end of services on St John the Evangelist’s day to Mass on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (i.e. 27–28 December – but you didn’t need me to tell you that, right?). The Boy Bishop would (sometimes) deliver a sermon, receive gifts, and get paid a handsome sum to boot – while the clergy were temporarily relegated to the choir stools.

The point? It was all about the exaltation of the humble and the humbling of the exalted – the dynamic celebrated by Mary in her song: ‘He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty’ (Luke 1:52-53). The kingdom that Jesus came into the world to bring was topsy turvy from the first – as He, the exalted one, stooped to take on human form: the ultimate humbling. The God who had forever been omnipresent and eternal – everywhere all at once – limited Himself to a human body; and with it, a single time and place.

There’s an irony to the way we do Christmas now. For many of us it’s a month of increasingly frenetic activity: gift buying, parties, family get-togethers, school plays, food shopping, card writing, church events, outreach initiatives and a lot more besides, plus all the usual demands of work and home – culminating in the production of an enormous roast dinner, before collapsing in a heap on Boxing Day.

It’s as though we celebrate Jesus taking on flesh to be in one time and place by being in as many times and places as we physically can; we mark Jesus taking on humanity by stretching ours to the limits. But might it be that a better way to celebrate the incarnation is to embrace our own, well, carnation? One body, in one place, at one time, giving our full attention to the person in front of us, exactly the way Jesus did. That’s the kind of December I want to have.

I’m with my friend: maybe it really would be better to be a medieval peasant. As long as I can pass on the turnips.