Bar humbug it’s that time of year again! PART -1-

Last weekend I went to Carols by Candlelight at a community event in a close country town to Melbourne and listened to the Melbourne Veterans Band play carols as part of this festival. With the flies and the generators powering the hot dog stand for the local emergency services fundraiser, the face painting of lions and tigers and the children’s animal farm and a host of other un-Christmas activities, it made absolutely no difference that you could not hear the band or the local church choir as they struggled to compete with the surrounding activities. Its saving grace for me was that we had a very nice picnic (we don’t normally have snow at Christmas in Australia) and a little reverie that I had in the midst of this debacle around the fact that this was possibly similar to what happened on the ‘first Christmas’, without the band of course.

The next night I was at my son’s Church which is a large Church of Christ trying to be an Assembly of God where it was like a TV production and was very slick with almost a 1000 people and a cast of hundreds. It was good and I was of course impressed with it because in front of this 40 piece orchestra, a rock band and a 30 voice choir stood my son conducting the whole lot, and yes I was proud, but I lost the Christmas feeling in some of the individual items that focussed, to me, on the cleverness of the music and I failed to get the message.

Topping that off was the next night when I watched part of a Christmas production on the telly of Carols in the Domain from Sydney. It was a crass promotional exercise between a supermarket chain and a TV station and was overrun with elves, little dancing dolls, Father Christmas magically appearing on stage to say Ho Ho Ho, (not really creative but you know what it is like) very bad sound and I was totally embarrassed by the fact that a combined Salvo choir were the backing for this production that has possibly emotionally scarred me for life.

Have you picked up yet that Christmas for me, is not a totally happy time? Yes! I recognise the real reason that we celebrate Christmas but from my point of view there is really only one significant celebration of our calendar and that is Easter Sunday; ‘He is not here! He is ....’ most of you know and live the rest of the quote. I could reminisce for ages on some of my Easter Sundays, one of the best was at the Red Light Corps in Amsterdam in 2007; for me it was just simply heaven on a stick.

Part -1-


FLETCH
Peter Fletcher
Former
Australia