Summary
The ethical calculation families across the UK have to make about seeing loved ones this Christmas could have far-reaching and potentially fatal consequences. The government has laid down the rules, but the moral choices lie between the gaps. Those who urge caution, even a postponement of Christmas, say it’s about taking personal responsibility to make everyone safe, and that it would be wrong to let our guard down now that the vaccine ‘cavalry’ is just over the other side of the hill. The other side of the argument is that, at the end of a terrible year, we deserve something to celebrate with family and friends, even if that means taking greater risks for a limited period of time. Do we have a right to Christmas? At what price? What is certain is that Christmas this year won’t be business as usual. So perhaps it is an opportunity to re-evaluate how and why we celebrate it? Some believe the pressure to conform to Christmas as we know it is psychologically bad for us. They are critical, sometimes for religious reasons, of what they see as months of build-up, driven by consumerism, all for a couple of days of rampant excess and dashed expectations, putting a strain on relationships. Is this a moment to reflect on the things that really matter; empathy for others over individualistic materialism? Others resist the call to simplify Christmas or to go back to its ‘original meaning’. Since time immemorial, Northern European cultures have celebrated a mid-winter festival, and before the Victorians re-invented Christmas, the season has always been somewhat raucous. Many think it should be a time of joyful celebration in the middle of dark nights and dark times; a gesture of companionship and welcome in modern, multi-cultural and multi-faith Britain. With Prof Linda Bauld, Ronald Hutton, Laura Perrins and Dr Steve Taylor.
Producer: Dan Tierney.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Good evening. Christmas is an odd business. It's almost certainly not Christ's birthday for a start. |
| 0:05.5 | Historians reckon he was most likely to have been born in the spring or early summer. |
| 0:10.3 | It's the pagan midwinter saturnalia that's been hijacked or at least rebranded as a Christian festival. |
| 0:16.1 | To some, a season to be jolly, holding out for the return of the sun, as apt a metaphor for this stage of the pandemic as you could wish. |
| 0:23.4 | To others, a week's long spasm of the kind of rampant consumerism, |
| 0:27.4 | self-indulgence and display that Christ himself spent much of his adult life preaching against. |
| 0:33.1 | The cost of Christmas this year, at any rate, according to the gloomier scientists and politicians, |
| 0:38.1 | will be measured in lives as well as hangovers and credit card debt. |
| 0:42.2 | But many think we need, we deserve a joyful celebration and human contact in these dark nights and dark times. |
| 0:50.3 | Is this the moment, though, when we should be rethinking Christmas, concentrating on what really matters, not feeding our faces, drinking far too much and falling out again with father-in-law? |
| 1:01.1 | Or is our world already too full of Cromwells, telling us what not to do, and squeezing the warmth and pleasure out of life? |
| 1:09.0 | What price Christmas? |
| 1:10.4 | Moral Mays tonight. The panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator at the Times, the historian Tim Stanley, Nazia Afzal, former chief prosecutor for the northwest of England, and the comedian Andrew Doyle. Andrew, this year's Christmas is no laughing matter, really, is it? No. You know, I understand people wanting to be sensible, the health risks and all the rest of it. But I think laying down rules at Christmas time isn't really going to work because Christmas is all about misrule and misbehaviour and getting drunk and sexual misadventures under the mistletoe. You know, maybe dressed as an elf or something. I remember some of that. Tim Stanley? I'm in two minds about this. I'm starting to wonder if this |
| 1:45.0 | Christmas could actually be my ideal Christmas, as in a bit miserable. I'm all for a celebrating |
| 1:49.9 | Christmas, but it has to be the right one, not the one that capitalism invented in the last |
| 1:54.9 | couple of hundred years just to sell us rubbish. Nazir, Nazir Afzan. Well, Michael, when you did that |
| 1:59.9 | landmark work in Ethiopia, there was a song, wasn't there? |
| 2:02.5 | It's Christmas time, and there's no need to be afraid. |
| 2:05.3 | But obviously, there's one major reason to be afraid. |
| 2:07.9 | Do we lose the many benefits that we've obtained through our sacrifices this last year? |
| 2:12.7 | Should we be counting our blessings rather than the amount of vodka that we drink? |
| 2:18.7 | I think that's the question we need to ask ourselves. Melanie, Melanie Phillips, a Jewish perspective, perhaps. Yes, well, I don't |
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