What does your Christmas Day look like? Do you have a Christmas tradition you like to stick to?
For our family, our tradition is being woken by our 12-year-old daughter Daisy for the manic paper-tearing opening of presents. Next, we’ll walk together to St Brendan’s in Annandale for Mass with Fr Mathew Meagher.
When we return home, we’ll imbibe a much-needed double espresso, before hopping in the car and driving across Sydney to the salubrious suburb of Vaucluse. This is where we’ll spend the next few hours, soaking up the sun in Neilson Park and swimming in the frighteningly named waters of the adjacent Shark Beach.
At midday, we enjoy hot chips, Paddle Pops and a Coca Cola from the Neilson Park kiosk, wallowing in the fact that our unhealthy treats on this special day of the year, are wonderfully, decadent.
Unfortunately, Neilsen Park and the adjacent beach has been closed since March 2022, to allow the replacement of the 100-year-old seawall.
And while bridges and bullet trains have been constructed more quickly, this tardy project is still not completed at going to press, meaning that we may miss our Christmas tradition for a third straight year.
Perhaps, like our family, you get upset when your time-held traditions are upturned. You might tell yourself it’s not fair.
But let’s get real, the issue of a family that can’t flagrantly enjoy junk food on the sand is what’s colloquially known as a “First World Problem.”
And while usually I flippantly respond to that hackneyed term with a shrug and a, “so? We live in a First World country”, this year I concede that our own obsession with tradition is more trivial than ever, especially in the light of what’s happening around the globe this Christmas.
We are seeing ongoing conflicts in more than 42 countries, with the most extreme being in Ukraine/Russia, Palestine, Syria, Mexico (drug war), Lebanon, Nigeria, and Myanmar.
Unfortunately, conflict at Christmas is nothing new. The Judea into which Jesus was born was riven with turmoil and religious unrest. Jewish Palestine had been deeply divided between warring factions for 150 years.
“Jerusalem in Jesus’s time was about a generation overdue for an explosion,’’ according to Professor Philip Jenkins, Director of the Program on Historical Studies of Religion at Baylor University.
Fast forward 1914 years and we see World War I (known then as The Great War) raging across France, Luxembourg, Belgium and Russia.
On December 7, 1914, Pope Benedict XV pleaded for an official truce at Christmas, asking “that the guns may fall silent at least upon the night the angels sing.”
The plea was officially ignored, but come a moonlit Christmas Eve, something magical happened along parts of the Western Front. Soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force could hear German troops singing carols in the trenches across the way.
One of those singing was Walter Kirchhoff, a German officer and tenor with the Berlin Opera. Kirchhoff belted out the most magnificent version of Silent Night ever heard, and he sung it in both English and German. This was the voice of an angel that the pope had prayed for.
With Kirchhoff’s notes soaring over the trenches and through the cold frosty night, those men who heard that 19th century carol about the birth of our tiny saviour, weren’t soldiers anymore. Their hearts became touched as ordinary men.
The next day, troops from both sides met in no man’s land, played a game of soccer and even exchanged gifts. They stopped and buried their dead,
The “Christmas Truce” as it became known, was beautifully captured in the 2005 drama, Joyeux Noël, where Kirchhoff’s powerful voice was dubbed by Mexican tenor Roland Villazon.
As might be expected, those in power were unhappy with the truce, worried it might quell the fighting spirit—the powerful have never embraced peace—and so the Christmas Truce was a one-off event.
But the fact remains, that if soldiers can find their way to express a tradition in the middle of a bloody battlefield, we can make a truce with tradition of our own.
Learn to sing like an angel, when everything around you is turning to putty.
And take some time to pray for peace.
Because the only tradition that counts is that we celebrate the birthday of our saviour Jesus Christ. Everything else is just chips on the beach.