Consumerist orgy or sacred festival? A number of people - some spiritual, some not - consider what the coming feast means to them
Anne Enright, writer
I know Christmas is supposed to be about children, but it's not. Children are just the display. They sit on the floor and eat the wrapping paper and play with the tree lights instead of the expensive toy. They are showered with presents, as though they were the Christ child Himself, then very carefully basted in melted chocolate. And they have an exciting, if somewhat bewildering day.
But it's not about them, you know. It is about us watching them. It is about us offering them to the ravenous affections of grandparents and aunts. And why should they not be loved, these children, with their Grand-da's eyes and their uncle's long toes? It isn't a child so much as a family jigsaw, it isn't a baby so much as a mobile phone through which you can talk to its parents (even if they are only sitting across the room).
So there is a deal of grief to all of this, too; the family renewing itself in hope, year after year. Children do not miss the people who have died. They do not know our disappointments and rivalries and hopes. They allow us to love each other - what an amnesty! what an excuse! - for hours in a row. And the fights only start when they have gone to bed.
Children sound such a clear note in the middle of all our personal noise - no wonder they are the Babbagod, before whom we lay our gifts. We do not spoil our children at Christmas, we spoil all our hopes - in a plastic rain of Lego and Fisher Price and My Little Pony. Waste is important, here. Waste is the point. Waste will make us rich.
The family is an economic impulse - it may get scattered over the years, but it is gathered again in the innocent greed of a new child. This is why we must buy them more stuff! (remember, you read it here first), because if they get more stuff and do a good Leaving Cert, then no one ever has to die.
I am a writer, I don't have a proper job, I am generally light on bourgeois satisfactions - but there is something astonishing about bringing a child, in a good coat, to its grandparents' door on Christmas Day. Here we are. This coat, good enough to last a lifetime, will be outgrown by the spring. Such solidity in the flux. This is not a child but a promise. It will continue. It will be secure.
Meanwhile, there is nothing wrong with adoring them, or using them in this way - just for the day that's in it, you understand. It does them no harm. And besides, they really do have a brilliant time.
Joe Kavanagh, Dominican, director of the distance education course in theology at St Mary's Priory, Tallaght
I love Christmas. I love the rhythm of these weeks, the countdown to the solstice, the whole sense of something new coming about. I love these grey, short days - not because they're grey and short, but because they're part of that rhythm. I lived in the tropics for the best part of 25 years and I missed this time of year, when there's a certain dropping of things before you hear the birds begin to sing again.
Christmas was celebrated in the early days of the church precisely because it was associated with the solstice - sol invictus, the sun undefeated - so I love Christmas because of all that. What disturbs me about the weeks leading up to Christmas is that the frenetic busy-ness of the time has tended to obliterate the most beautiful season of the church's calendar.
Advent is all about waiting, about holding and honouring the facet of life that is incomplete. In our society we're into fulfilment and glutting: we can't handle the "not-yetness" of life, so we try to fill it with lots of busy-ness. As for Christmas itself, it says something very powerful about the accessibility, even the vulnerability, of God, who didn't just come down and pretend to be human: this is God stuck in the muck and the mess and the politics of his - her? - time. One of the problems is that we take that accessibility and we make it cuddly. Not that I have anything against babies, but it's not really honouring the incredible mystery of it!
But then I also like the plum pudding and the hot whiskey end of things as well.
David Joyce, Legal Policy Officer, the Irish Traveller Movement
I'm in two minds about the whole Christmas thing, really. At one level I'm pretty cynical about Christmas and all the consumer craziness that goes with it, which can create terrible pressure, especially financial pressure, on people. On the other hand, you do get holidays from work and a chance to spend time with your family. For that reason I think it's important.
My own children are at the age where they're fantastically excited by Santa Claus arriving, and we do all the celebration and visiting of relations and all of that - and I do, of course, believe in Santa Claus myself. As an idea, generally speaking. I think he's not a bad influence, when all is said and done. But I do get a little bit concerned about all the false sentimentality around Christmas. I mean, why should we just be nice to people at this time of year - why can't we be more human for the rest of the year as well?
Vona Groarke, poet
It's the colour of the sky that draws me in: a pure, hard turquoise of the kind with a basis in gold. It confers on the distant hills a glorious future that frames the foreground action. There, the Virgin Mary holds the Christ-child on her right knee, her cape spread out on the plinth behind her, her hair sheathed in a halo that only we can see. The perched infant stares hard into the eyes of the kneeling, ornate king. There is a gift extended, though we can't quite make it out. Instead, the giver's hands, that this morning settled brocaded robes and fastened jewels, are lit with a small intensity that reflects the face, so even the thick-set beard is allowed a single, gilded hair.
Not one figure in the full triptych of Lucas van Leyden's Adoration of the Magi is noticing the gift. Instead, onlookers press upon the scene. And there are many. They throng the side panels, the braided and shod, the prosperous few that talk to themselves only; the unstockinged men that keep their eye on what is happening elsewhere; the blind on the buttress; the cripple with his stick; the fallen child; the gaping-mouthed; the devout, amazed, incurious; the bored.
The right is dominated by a horse's rump that occupies almost the same canvas space as Mother and Child. Like Breughel's Icarus or Auden's Breughel, the momentous is muffled by the ordinary; the rich gift balanced, in the scheme of things, by a drape of cloth, a horse's twitching tail.
The art connects the early 16th-century and here: a room in the Barnes Foundation near Philadelphia, home to one of the world's great private art collections, built up by a man who bought from, in his own words, "suckers ... who had to sell their priceless paintings" during the American Depression. Give and take. The art, at least, survives.
Soon, a flood of gifts will claim us all: desired, daft, symbolic, throwaway, disappointing, duplicate, extravagant, helpful, useless, cherished, cheapskate, recycled, promised, life-changing or insincere gifts. What of them will we remember? What of them survives?
Far off on the horizon, a lone tree marks the high-point of this scene. What matters, it tells us, is going on; the rest is only a minor fuss, a detail in the important give and take, a single moment when the setting sun picks out one hair on the giver's head, and makes of it, pure gold.
Alan Cross, third-year student at the Church of Ireland theological college in Rathmines, Dublin
One of the things that always reminds me of Christmas, at every time of year, is the smell of fresh-cut lemon. I grew up in a small village in rural Armagh in the days of rock-hard royal icing - none of your fancy sugar-paste stuff - and I never smell a lemon but I think of those happy childhood times - being sent out to gather moss for Christmas decorations, going to Messiah at the Ulster Hall in Belfast. Another great Christmas memory is of rolling a little ball of orange marzipan on the side of a grater to make it look like an orange. That's the lovely childhood phase.
After that there comes a time when you get so busy with it all that Christmas becomes anything but pleasurable.
There is a sort of trajectory through life, in which your feelings and emotions about Christmas change as you go through happy times and sad times. The first Christmas after a death in the family is a particularly tough one.
At this stage my faith has matured to the point where I can reflect on Christ's coming and his birth, not only as a historic event but as a daily one - that he is born in me, in you, in everyone that we meet. Christianity is not just about Christ being born in a stable with three kings and Joseph and Mary and a few cattle - it's about that birth being authentic and vital within us today.
Xin Hua, the Chinese Medical Centre in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin
In China we don't know the word "Christmas" until we're at school or university. Then we learn English and we say, "So Christmas is the same as Chinese New Year", because we know that for Westerners Christmas is the biggest festival in the year. I'm from Beijing. I've been in Ireland for four years, and my biggest memories of Christmas are: shopping, shopping, shopping!
This is different in China because we don't give each person a special present - when we visit friends or family members we bring a present for the house. Chinese New Year is a big get-together for families. We have a big meal and watch telly, because there are special programmes on, special performances all over the country. Years ago we used to have fireworks in the big cities as well, but now it's not allowed because they're too dangerous. So we just listen to the New Year's Bell.
At the Chinese Medical Centre we have a lot of Chinese people working here, so we celebrate Chinese New Year ourselves - we make dumplings, which are the traditional food for the festival. And it's a good chance to get together because dumplings take a long time to make!
Paul McKeever, organist and choir director
I'm involved with the Scola Cantorum Dublinensis; we do a sung Vespers every Friday evening at 6.30 p.m. in the University Church on St Stephen's Green. At the moment, obviously, the music has an Advent flavour. For me as a musician, Christmas is about connecting to a ritual which has been coming up over and over again since childhood, and which allows me to look back and reflect on things. In a way, it's my start to the new year; my call to start afresh.
At the moment I'm also doing a course in chant at the University of Limerick, so I'm very aware of the beginnings of Western music.
We're studying facsimiles of early manuscripts, which take you into an Umberto Eco-type world of squiggles and strange notations of rhythm and pitch - a whole other language which medieval musicians would have taken for granted but which, to us, is like trying to decipher Sanskrit. So Christmas this year will give me even more insight as a musician because I'm seeing it through this particular prism. No flashy goods, as it were - no polyphony - just the straight monophonies of chant. And it's amazing. It gives me great spiritual space.
John Feighery, Divine Word missionary who has worked in Brazil
We had come, Sister Veronica and I, to Jeriba - a ramshackle village in Brazil's back-of-beyond. Stopping the jeep beside a mud and straw shack, Veronica pointed to two babies lying in the dust. Both were naked and filthy. Scrawny chickens pecked around them. "I'm thinking of adopting one of those babies for Cleusa," Veronica said.
Cleusa was a teacher in the local town, one of a family of 14 children. Romance seemed to have passed her by. In rural Brazil, an unmarried woman over 25 is virtually on the shelf. But a child, adopted or home-grown, brings joy and status. And, besides, Cleusa and her parents, though not well-off, could rear one more child.
Sister Veronica explained that the two grubby tots were in fact aunt and niece. One was the daughter of the lady of the shack - skeletal, gap-toothed and dressed in rags. The other toddler was the child of her daughter, a prostitute living far from home. Mother and grandmother were quite happy to hand over this second baby who was sick and ill-nourished.
Later that day the little girl was welcomed royally by Cleusa and her family. And then, soon afterwards, a new love entered Cleusa's life. A young man of her own age, Eustachio, was visiting outback parishes and contemplating a missionary vocation. On meeting Cleusa, he fell helplessly in love and they were married within a year. The presence of an adopted, ready-made daughter was simply an added grace.
It is easy in Brazil to see the relevance of the Christian Gospel. The Gospel is, after all, a story about poor people, written for poor people. Get away from the jet-set suburbs of the big cities and the poor are all around you. The street children, the single mothers, men and women prematurely aged by too much work and too little food. The majority retain an irrepressible optimism. "God is good," they say with conviction, even as you think that in their case the evidence is less than overwhelming.
Mary of Nazareth - a single woman in advanced pregnancy journeying to Bethlehem - is the very paradigm of the poor. Remote, indifferent powers decreed that her journey had to be made, however harsh and dangerous. There are always millions of Marys throughout the world. But few of those journeys end as happily as Mary's with the birth of a child whose glorious destiny had been foretold.
Six years had passed since Sister Veronica had found a good home for a wretched baby. I was now living in the state capital, Belo Horizonte. Mine was a new parish where most of the residents were migrant workers. Mass was still being celebrated on a table in the open air. One Sunday a small girl whom I didn't recognise came by. She was beautiful and exquisitely dressed. But what really caught my attention was a special radiance of happiness and well-being that emanated from her. "Who is that little girl?" I asked. Someone replied "Oh, she's Cleusa and Eustachio's daughter."
John O'Neill, the Irish Buddhist Centre
The majority of people who would regard themselves as Buddhists in Ireland would come from a traditional Irish background, so probably most of them would have all the trappings of Christmas in their homes because they'd be sentimentally attached to it all. Of course it doesn't feature as a festival in the Buddhist tradition but people go along with it - and why not? For children, especially, it's a very nice time. There is a problem in terms of consumerism, certainly, but I think that's a problem for everyone nowadays - not just for Buddhists. There is terrible pressure on people to buy and consume. But anyone who has looked into Buddhist teachings will realise that very little of that brings any kind of satisfaction or lasting happiness. Contentment, and some kind of moderation - not too little, not too much - is probably the best approach.
Anne Enright, Vona Groarke and John Feighrey wrote their own pieces. Joe Kavanagh, David Joyce, Alan Cross, Xin Hua, Paul McKeever and John O'Neill spoke to Arminta Wallace