four candles

I tell you what, the life of a tedious atheist is not an easy one, especially at Christmas. I know I don't complain much about it on here these days, but only because the weight of the world has crushed my spirit and, you know, what's the point of anything any more, really? Nonetheless there is a fine line to be walked between going WELL ACTUALLY every time anything vaguely religious is mentioned and nodding along in acquiescence to all of it, just for a quiet life. 

A good example is Christmas carol singing, which I quite like, not because I am filled with religious fervour at celebrating the birth of our lord and saviour Jesus Christ, but because communal singing is quite a nice cultural tradition, especially when it's cold and dark outside. The difficulty here is that if you want to do it you will very probably have to put up with quite a bit of religious nonsense interwoven with the occasional carols, since in general even the Christmas Eve singing happens in the context of a religious service, albeit mercifully shorn of the really heavy-duty praying and sermonising.

We decided that it might be nice to take the kids along for a bit of a sing this year and so we decided to go to the afternoon carol service at a nearby church. This turned out to be St. Mark's, a short drive away, rather than St. John's just around the corner, purely owing to scheduling convenience. Both churches are affiliated with the Church in Wales, which is broadly the Welsh equivalent of the Church of England. St. John's does allude on its website to being "firmly in the Tractarian/Anglo-Catholic tradition"; fortunately I neither need nor desire to know what the fuck that means, nor how significant any of these minor doctrinal differences are.

Anyway, it was perfectly nice, and they stuck mostly to the well-known favourites in terms of the carol selection, though disappointingly didn't finish will the usual cathartic bellow through O Come All Ye Faithful. There wasn't a huge congregation, probably 60-80 people at most, and so I did encounter the slight catch-22 situation you can find yourself in here, particularly if your voice is on the low side compared to the rest of the singers: you can't really work out if you're singing in tune without singing loudly enough to hear yourself, by which time it's a bit late. In a larger crowd making a bigger noise you can do it more discreetly, or at least conclude that it doesn't matter because everyone else will be carrying the tune along.

There were a couple of readings and a bit of slightly protracted audience participation in terms of populating the stable/manger diorama thingy they'd set up at the front of the church. Some odd differences in scale aside (tiny cow, mahoosive sheep, etc.) they stuck to the traditional animal line-up, rather than the wildly variable cast of characters you see at school nativity plays - fish, scuba divers, spacemen etc. 

The only thing that was out of the ordinary was that after the main business of the service had concluded the congregation trooped over to the back of the church to participate in some bizarre voodoo ritual involving candles and oranges. Those of you who have been paying close attention to my Twitter feed over the years, or just generally know more about stuff than I do, will recognise this as a Christingle.

Nia went to a Christingle church service with her Rainbows group this morning. I have (at best) mixed feelings about the whole thing, as you can imagine, but mainly just bafflement about what #Christingle is. seems to be something to do with oranges. #voodoo #religion

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) February 3, 2019

"A Christingle" is the correct usage, by the way, as the term refers to the object itself, which is, as you can see, just an orange with a candle stuck in it and four cocktail sticks skewering some marshmallows and raisins. 

The question you might usefully ask yourself here is: why does this tradition, apparently cooked up out of thin air by some guy in Germany (not, as you might have assumed, a guy called Chris Dingle) a couple of hundred years ago, seem so bizarre and the metaphors (the orange represents the world, the skewered sweets the four seasons, or possibly the four "corners" of the earth, etc.) so contrived, while the other stuff more central to Christianity's core belief system (the whole Nativity thing with the wise men bringing gifts, the resurrection, the subsequent water/wine business) is given, if not exactly a free pass, some nodding respect even by non-adherents? Any claim that the latter is different because it's based on stuff that actually happened is dubious at best, so you have to conclude that it's mainly about age. Two hundred years is not enough for bizarre shit to fossilise into unquestioned tradition, so I guess the Christingle thing is still in what I like to call the Scientology Zone. 

Anyway, the kids had a nice enough time without coming away filled with religious conviction. Nia is old enough to find the religion thing quite interesting, from a cultural/anthropological perspective, and we did have a conversation on the way home wherein I explained my theory of religion's persistent cultural "stickiness"; basically that it's useful for a community to have shared "stories" to help identify each other, and it's actually more useful for these to be fictitious than for them to be true. More on this here, mainly in the paragraph featuring the Captain Cavemen image, if you want to skip past all the stuff about Noel Edmonds. 

Overall it was quite nice, my squirmy discomfort with some of the more nonsensical elements aside, like being expected to intone a solemn "Amen" at the end of some craven pleadings to a potentially vengeful deity. I was, as I always am, conscious while singing of the absurdity of some of the lyrics - I definitely got a sideways look from Nia at "offspring of a virgin's womb" during Hark The Herald Angels Sing, and another one at "Veiled in flesh the Godhead see" a few moments later, at which I was presented with a mental image of Jesus wearing Lady Gaga's meat dress from the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards.

Finally, that BBC link contains the following paragraph, inadvertently revealing of the charming innocence of the showbiz reporter in the face of smutty innuendo:

Slashed to the thigh, and featuring a cowl neck, the dress came with matching beefy boots, hat and meat clutch. "I never thought I'd be asking Cher to hold my meat purse," said Gaga as she picked up her award for the Bad Romance video – perhaps unaware that Cher doesn't eat meat.