Unicorns at Christmas

Each December, millions upon millions of our kith and kin decorate a christmas tree, open each day of an Advent calendar, send everyone they can think of a christmas card, scratch their heads over what gift to buy granddad this time,  listen to Carols from Kings and the King’s Speech, drink more than they should and eat more than they thought they could. Most of us end up doing pretty much the same things as everybody else this time of year,  but Christmas would not be Christmas without those peculiar little idiosyncratic rituals unique to your little cabal of close family members,  friends or even just yourself. It might be a particular tree ornament that everyone’s attached to; a once a year visit to Auntie Blank; an annual joke about food poisoning, or if you’re really unlucky genuine seasons-greetings squiffy stomach; a song that only gets played once a year (as long as it’s not Slade, please); Auntie Blank’s foray into the wilder frontiers of knitting. However much most of our experience of Christmas are culturally shared ones, we all have a few parts of the season that are all our own.

A member of my own family, who will go nameless because it’s unfilial to embarrass your mother in public, had for decades a Christmas ritual that, as far as I know, is unique. This is it. You buy a top class turkey, just big enough to fit into your oven. In order for the out-sized bird to be ready for lunch at one o’clock, it needs to start cooking at around five in the morning. Since your children no longer wake you at four on Christmas day, instead, you can set the advanced  timing function on your oven for it to come on at 5 am, put the turkey in straight after midnight mass and and have a lie in. Except, of course, this is the only time of the year you ever want to use that oven auto-on function, and so cannot really remember how to use it and, even though your youngest son gave you clear, idiot-proof written instructions how to do it some 20 years ago, you are still never quite sure you have set it properly. The result being, of course, that, year after year, you set the timer so you don’t have to get up early, and then find yourself at five past five, getting out of bed anyway, to make sure the oven has turned itself on. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be Christmas would it?

I understand the turkey is always cooked to perfection, though, being vegetarian I can only take the testimonials of everybody else as proof. I suspect I’m missing out on something really good, but I just can’t face the prospect of eating something that once had a face, even if it was a very silly face with a daft dangly red bit hanging down the front, an infinitesimally small amount of brain hiding behind it and a mouth that could manage to say nothing wiser its entire life than ‘gobble’.

This Christmas however, I have found a way that I can join in with the feast.  I’ve found the meat that even a vegetarian can eat, and I have a tin of it right here.

Radiant Farms, Canned Unicorn Meat. ‘Magic in every bite.’ ‘An excellent source of sparkles.’ 

Now the manufacturers of this gourmet delicacyare clearly a canny lot, because they know that fundamental fact of human nature, which is that we will buy into any old.. rubbish, even if we know it cannot possibly be true, simply because we would dearly love it to be true.  

Not, of course, Santa Claus who is as I speak busy lugging his sack around the skies and clambering down chimneys. At least for those who’ve been good this year, which must be, well most of us. No, real rubbish like, the UFO industry, those Japanese lucky cat ornaments, the National Lottery, horoscopes, tarot card readings, homoeopathy, and the tooth fairy. Anybody I’ve missed offending? Still half a sermon to go… hold on.

The celebration of Christmas is one that is so ingrained in our culture, such a potentially happy, joyous occasion, that almost everyone is turned into  a Christian of a sort at this time of year. I’ve even, in Newham a few years back, seen the wonderful happy clash of woman sporting a habib topped with a Santa hat. Fabulous. But I say almost everyone, because there’s always those twenty-first century Scrooges, Ebenezer Dawkins and the like, those who always dance round the latest census results with glee, as if the world becomes a better place if fewer people believe in God. They look at this celebration and say ‘Bah, Humbug! It’s all a load of old unicorn meat. You lot still believe in the tooth fairy! The Emperor has no clothes! Son of God? Born in a stable in  Bethlehem? Where’s the evidence? Pull the other one! I mean, you would have thought somebody might have noticed!’

It’s a good point. You would have thought somebody might have noticed.

OK, there was that Herod guy, but then dictators are often crazed and paranoid, what with all that power and corruption. They see plots and coups round every corner, assassins under every bed, rivals for the throne everywhere. Given what they’ve done to get where they are, you can hardly blame them.

And those shepherds who thought they’d seen angels. Well it’s easy to let your imagination run riot when you’re cold and tired and bored and keeping yourself warm and happy with the contents of a hip flask. One sip too many of that stuff and we’re all away dancing with the pixies.

Those guys from the east, the weird foreign ones, astrologers or something? Those star gazers are potty at the best of times- look at Patrick Moore: nice guy but seriously weird. The full moon is supposed to set the crazies off howling and yeowling: probably that new star had the same effect on them. I mean you set off in the middle of winter to travel hundreds of miles just to follow a star? That’s almost a definition of lunacy.

And of course mothers always think their baby is important, their baby is different to everybody else’s. That Mary just got a bit carried away, took it a little further than everybody else.

And, well, erm that’s the lot. You see? This Christmas business is all moonshine and  elves and rainbows and wishful thinking. Nobody noticed. You want us to believe that God became man and nobody noticed? Nobody noticed.

Yes, nobody noticed. But then they wouldn’t, would they? A baby born in squalor on a filthy stable floor in the back of nowhere, why would anybody bother to notice that? Just another peasant baby born to an unmarried teenage mother. It’s a scene being played out all over the world as I speak, and just as it was two thousand years ago, so it is now: nobody notices.

And that’s pretty much the whole point.  You see, you would notice God wouldn’t you? But you wouldn’t notice another human. At Christmas, God became human. So nobody would notice. Do it properly and nobody will. You’re not exactly going to have the typical human life experience – which is half the point- you’re not exactly going to have a normal life if everybody thinks you’re the incarnation of God. 

So first Christmas around, nobody noticed. That Christmas was busy happening off stage, at the back of the supermarket, out in the provinces, with a cast of unknowns and nobodies, foreigners and refugees, has-beens and certifiable crazies. 

It still is. Christmas is still happening for all those people who are not too proud or too important or too rich or too clever to notice.

The Emperor has no clothes. But what newborn baby ever does?