For the last few years, as the winter solstice approaches, I have written a reflective blog. It seems the seasonal thing to do as we face the longest night of the year and mark the season in which we slowly begin our journey back from the darkness into the light. Of course, communities in our cold little island have done this for millennia, but while our distant ancestors celebrated the continual fertility of evergreens and the restorative powers of fire in heat and light, as the solstice rolls around yet again, for us, it’s time for the annual infants and juniors nativity play. I was surprised to read Toby Young’s recent take on this in The Spectator: ‘I never cease to wonder at all the parents up on their feet filming the entire performance...are they really going to afflict this on the grandparents’ because I am a grandparent who loves being ‘afflicted’ to such an extent that I always do my very best to attend in person.
What I love most of all about children’s nativity plays (besides seeing my own wonderful grandchildren of course) is the glorious, mash-up celebration drawing upon both old and new cultural narratives; a continuation of what human beings in Britain have been doing since they arrived here, whether they called their winter festival Yule, Samhain or Christmas. This year, my 5 year old grandson’s Reception/Year 1 nativity was constructed in the style of Strictly Come Dancing, with the donkey, the inn keeper’s wife and Caesar as the judges and the other characters typically found in the nativity play as the contestants. The angels were ballet dancers, the stars did a sort of hand-jive, the inn keepers did a tango, and the camels flossed. The flossing camels were my own personal preference for the glitter ball. The audience were invited to cheer the kind, generous judges (the donkey and the inn-keeper’s wife) and boo the nasty judge (Caesar). And at the end, Mary and Joseph brought the baby Jesus to watch, reminding us that that the festival that marks the returning of the light was always rooted in the concept of new life, and new beginnings.
While we are all located in our life journeys by generation, ethnicity, gender and many other individual differences, what we can all share in the annual mid-winter festival is the celebration of new beginnings in the returning of the light. And, like many grandparents I suspect, this always triggers a reflection for me on how swiftly another year has passed, and how quickly my second generation of ‘little ones’ are growing up; a reminder to treasure these all too brief years of childhood.
Every so often, other incidents occur that remind me of how quickly the years have passed. During a picnic in the park this summer, when I told my grandsons and some of their friends to ‘be careful’ a deep voice behind me said ‘I have always been very careful since your granny told me to be, boys’. I was immediately transported to a summer day long ago when this father-of-three climbed a lamppost near my house and I found him hanging on at the top, being called a ‘thug’ by a neighbour. We both laughed then, remembering my comment to the adult that he was a daft kid, not a thug, and the ‘now what has that taught you’ telling off I gave him when he managed to scramble down. These are the homely incidents of which real human lives are made, not bungling politicians in Westminster or Washington, professional rivalries, social media spats or any pattern of electrons in the internet.
Someone recently asked me, do we mourn for our children when they are grown and gone to forge their own lives? It’s a question that I have contemplated many times over the past decade. My initial experience of absent children was walking around silent, tidy bedrooms while the young people they belonged to were away at university. I used to think of this as rather like being Mrs Darling in Peter Pan, with children who had flown away, but would be back soon. Then as summer came around, the ‘boings’ from the basketball hoop in the back garden would sound again, alongside now deeper voices from young men playing there as they had for so many summers, walking in and out to get beers from the fridge rather than Cokes. Then as university days retreated into the past, the back garden fell silent and the bedrooms were turned into offices as my children began to travel the globe. This was not so much of a period of mourning, more a wistful lull...
Last year I read an article written by a mother who, after she took her son to university for his first year, had a repeating dream that she did just this, but came home to find that he was a baby in his cot again. It wasn’t an online article, and there was no contact information for the author, but had I been able to do so, I would have replied well, that’s exactly how happens, but it will be another baby who looks a bit like your son, and you will have to wait just a little while longer for that. And now, a child’s bed and boxes of toys can yet again be found in one of our bedrooms. This summer, I found my eldest, 8 year old grandson looking thoughtfully at the rusty basketball hoop on the back wall of our house. ‘Granny, have you got a basketball?’ he asked.
So round the cycle we go again, and the fact that our winter festival can be so effectively tracked into the distant past seems to me to be a comfortable illustration of the continuity between generations across millennia. And this year, as midnight chimes on the 21st December and yet again, we move slowly back into the light, I will again be contemplating the long line of ancestors who took time out from the joys and sorrows of the human existence that we all share to celebrate this perennial event within the culture of time and place in which they were located. I will also be looking forward with hope to the future solstices my grandsons will see, up to the dawn of the twenty-second century and beyond, with the celebrations of time and place reminding them too that, for another year, Here Comes the Sun.
Happy holidays, everyone.