Community Carols at the Meeting House 2014

As a Unitarian I am delighted that yesterday the Meeting House committee in Ringwood held a community carols session co-sponsored by the Unitarians in Ringwood.  We had carols marking Christmas and other festivals, some more familiar than others.  The words weren’t necessarily quite what people expected, and some were very taken by that.  And the children loved it.

In Great Britain our history is a fusion of many people’s histories, and our faiths are fusions of many different faiths.   Christmas is a festival set against a Jewish cultural background, brought to these islands by Romans and grafted onto the original pre-Christian earth-spirit beliefs.

In these islands it was a pre-Christian practice to hold a festival in the middle of winter to mark the turning of the year, the lengthening of the days, and hope for the future; called Solstice.  It is Solstice today, and people gathered at Stonehenge to see the rising sun at the start of the new solar year.  Near the Solstice, pre-Christian people here celebrated their ancestors in a festival called Yule.  We still talk of Yule logs, though today these tend to be chocolate cakes rather than a smouldering log on the fire.

And brought to Britain from the Middle East, there is a Jewish miracle story from 2000 BCE of an oil-lamp, low on oil, burning continuously for eight days on no more than a drop of oil in the besieged temple of Jerusalem, though it should have gone out long before.  Coming in the dead of winter, Hanukkah celebrates the triumph of light over darkness, of purity over contamination, of spirituality over materialism.  Jewish people the world over have just celebrated Hanukkah on 16 December.

And of course some of the later Romans to arrive here told of the Jewish baby whose mother was turned away from the inn and who laid him in a manger: the baby who as an adult went on to teach that we are loved into being, we are supported throughout our lives by love, and at our ending we are received in love.  Jesus’ good news was that each of us and all of us are loved, and we must pass that love on.  The birth of the baby Jesus is what we celebrate at Christmas.

So all these festivals, and others such as Diwali from Hinduism and Eid from Islam, which also sometimes fall in winter,  are what have fused into our British cultural celebration at this time of year.