Tradition gathers around Christmas. Pageants and homecomings and longed-for preparations repeat themselves year after year into beloved lifetime rituals.
Christmas is also about the unique drama of a miraculous birth intended to save all mankind. It does not mark some gentle, festive, reassuring and comfortable everyday event. It involves an occurrence that shook the world and shakes it to this day. This is why I have a special liking for Ted Hughes’s Christmas poem “Minstrel’s Song” which gives some feeling and sense of the tremendous drama, strangeness and searing impact of this birth that re-started history.