The trouble with Christmas is that it reminds me of all the people who are not going to enjoy it: Alistair Cooke, the sacked England cricket-captain; a friend recently diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease; North Sea oil-workers facing unemployment; Syrian refugees; Christians in Iranian jails; the victims of ancient hatreds in the country of Jesus’ birth.

Yet there is still the magic of it. It’s been a couple of years since I last hanged my stocking, modern Christmas-puddings no longer contain threepenny-bits, I can’t see much hope of going sledging down the moor, trousers frozen hard from knees to boots, and even if I do get an apple, an orange and a bottle of lemonade they won’t taste the same as they did in 1947, when an oxo-cube was a treat.  But there is still the joy of sending letters to Santa telling him I’d like socks; the joy of seeing others glad with what he’s brought them; the luxury of a day when you can do nothing, with the tacit approval of conscience; the turkey which is ‘perfectly cooked’ even when it isn’t, and tastes better than a Bronze even though it’s only a Frozen.

And, above all, the carols: ringing in my head ever since Primary Three, and now ringing out at Classic FM, Free Church carol-services, and school-concerts where Buddhists, Muslims and Edinburgh City councillors join happily with Christians in singing of ‘our heavenly Lord, that with his blood mankind hath bought’.

All of which set me thinking of the spirit of Christmas, and then I quickly realised that it needed a capital; ‘spirit’ wouldn’t do; it had to be ‘Spirit’ as in ‘Holy Spirit’, because without him there would have been no Baby Jesus, since no virgin has ever yet produced a child all by herself.  After all, you can’t explain a child (not even one in a manger) simply by saying there was no man around.  Ova don’t fertilise spontaneously, so there had to be something else making up for the absence of a man; and that something else was the Holy Spirit, although once again the wording’s a bit off, because he’s not a thing but a person who thinks and speaks, and leads and prays, and gets hurt.  It was he who said, ‘Let there be the Baby Jesus’; and there was; created not only ‘in’ Mary, but ‘from’ Mary.  He was her boy, with her features and her courage; and though there was nothing of Joseph in him, he was proud to be known as his father, though unlike his Mum, he would be spared the agony of seeing him die.

The cattle ‘moo’ in the background, and the baby cries, needing to be changed.  A little distance away some women are talking in hushed whispers.  They’re not allowed to have opinions of their own, and so they approach a group of venerable-looking men.  Could it be true?  Absolutely not! say the men.  They believe in modern science, and know that the earth is flat, that the sun goes round it and that man will never reach the moon.  And they know that virgins can’t make babies.  The women nod happily, glad to have their suspicions confirmed.

This disturbs my Christmas spirit.  After all, there is Something.  Why, then can’t there be Anything: Anything at all?  Can God not make a baby?  After all, he made the stars and the mighty thunder and the living cell.

But ah! say the venerable men, pityingly, it wasn’t God who made these, but another God called Evolution.  Fascinating! especially today, when I’ve just seen an amazing example of what Evolution can do: my gas-engineer’s watch can take text-messages ’cos it’s connected to his phone.  Isn’t Evolution a great god, producing watches, text-messages and the Double Helix all by itself?  Presumably, if we wait long enough (say, another 15 billion years) Evolution will one day produce another virgin birth.  The odds against that are certainly no greater than the odds against it producing a Sgiathanch (pure accident, of course).  And what chance Evolution turning things completely round and giving us a man who can produce a baby without a woman?

Anyway, since Evolution is so clever, it’s odd that it had never done a Virgin Birth before, and rather irritating that in the one recorded instance of such a thing the girl didn’t do it all by herself after all.  In fact, she hadn’t even asked Santa for a baby, but God decided she was the one, and sent his Spirit (the very one who had made the stars and the mighty thunder) to create that new life in her womb.  Even so, honoured though she was, we shouldn’t rush to envy her.  There was a price to be paid: a sword would pierce her soul, and perhaps it is always so.  Millions still suffer because of their links with Mary’s boy.

But God’s gone about it strangely, too.  Why did he give us a gospel which doesn’t seem to connect?  Does he deliberately want to put people off?  The very first page of the New Testament is almost impossible to swallow, especially if you want to keep your cool, intellectual friends.  After all, a Saviour born in a stable by means of a miracle that’s scientifically impossible!  Come off it!  But then, that’s the thing about miracles.  They’ve always been impossible.  After all, once there was Nothing, and then there was Something.  How can anyone believe that?  But Christianity’s always been hopeless at public relations, as if it didn’t believe in connecting: a Ha! Ha! birth, a crucified God and a man who has an al fresco meal with his disciples a couple of weeks after he died.

But then, supposing you had to advise God about the best way to become man, what would have been your advice?  Perfect Love could never have grown on an evolutionary stock; and when it came by another route, men couldn’t abide it, and so they killed it.  Then it had the bad grace to defy the laws of modern science yet again, and come back.

Odd how it survived, such a weak, sickly thing in a world where the primary law is the survival of the fittest.  It must be that Spirit again, still looking after Mary’s boy.



This article first appeared in the West Highland Free Press on Friday, 26^th December, 2014.