Christmas memories

The columnist had the opportunity to see and hear various creative communication aspects of Christmas during his stay working for the British Broadcasting Corporation as a Sinhala radio programme producer. These are some of the memories.

"This time, it is going to be a white Christmas," said my friend from the BBC, who had come to London Heathrow airport to meet me. That was as far back as late sixties and it was my first visit to the UK. As we went out of the airport lounge, I saw the whole surrounding covered with snow, which for me was a pleasing sight. But I wanted to know why my friend used the term 'white Christmas'. When enquired he said, "If the ground is profusely covered with snow, just before Christmas, people here use the term white Christmas."

I wanted to know more about it. "It is lucky to have snow all around during the Christmas time," he said. "Is there a black Christmas as well?", I asked jokingly though it was no joke at all.

"Yes, there is a concept called black Christmas as well, and it needs some explanation." Then he explained how some disasters take place during the Christmas season through the negligence and forgetfulness and if things of that sort happen we say that it is a black Christmas for some. Later on, to explain the concept of black Christmas he handed me an informative article written by Dudley Barker titled 'Don't have a Black Christmas', where the following events were recorded.

"A few days before Christmas, a father of seven children in South Croydon in Surrey, went out to his garden for some earth to pot the family Christmas tree. Left alone in the seasonably - decorated lounge, the children playing excitedly, knocked over a paraffin convector heater. Flames shot six feet high and set the Christmas decorations ablaze.

This is just one incident that caused a black Christmas for the family concerned. Then there is another incident that goes as follows.

A three years girl sitting on the settee was engulfed in fire; somehow the parents battled their way through the holocaust to get their daughter out. 'Her little shoes' sobbed the mother later 'were like red hot-coals of fire. The child died in hospital. That was another incident of black Christmas. Just one more event. 'In Essex, a girl of two and a half was burnt to death when she tried with matches, to light the coloured electric 'candles' on the Christmas tree'.

Let us not recollect too many of the black Christmas events for it give us sadness. Most creative writers have tried their best to create as far as possible a fine picture of Christmas with all the niceties like giving and accepting of gifts and sharing the blessings of the mother nature by helping each other especially the needy elders and children in orphanages.

In England I found a pamphlet titled 'a merry Christmas and a safe one' issued free by the fire brigade and the fire protection association, giving details as to how one should adhere to safety regulations.

"The saddest Christmas tragedies" said one of the elderly teachers. "Are those involving children who suffer because of their belief in some of the gruesome Christmas legends." When asked to explain and clarify, he told me something to this effect.

"One little boy in a certain country side house was a victim of a fatal accident due to the fact that he was calling up the chimney to Santa Claus on Christmas eve.

"I like to kill the idea that Santa Claus comes down the chimney, instead if you want to retain the age old spirit of the fantasy, tell the children that he comes by a sleigh and has a key to the front door. That will amuse the child and the bliss of Christmas is fulfilled."

The Christmas stories have an extremely fine layer of fantasy which is seen culminated in Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol. But it is just not the fantasy that matters, but the communication of the humanistic layer embedded which is suitable for all times. Quite a number of television and film versions were recreated based on Dickens's story. Moving down the memory lane I came across a Christmas nursery rhyme which goes as follows:

"Little Jack Horner

sat in a corner

Eating his Christmas pie;

He stuck in his thumb

And pulled out a plum and said

'What a good boy am I?'"

As recorded by the writer Edna Sollars: "This nursery rhyme was composed during the reign of Henry viii. But this favourite nursery rhyme was originally a stinging political lampoon. Henry had claimed for himself the wealth of the Holy Catholic Church. On pain of confiscation, and dire punishment, the rich monastic properties were ordered into the private coffers of the king.

The Archbishop of Glastonbury bowed to the inevitable and deeds to 12 magnificent estates were sorrowfully placed within a great pie - this being a popular method of presenting gifts.

John Horner was commissioned to place this fabulous bit of pastry in Henry's hands. When the emissary returned from court, he had with him the deed to Mells Park, Somerset, whose ancient stone buildings had been the favourite retreat of the Archbishop.

The people refused the explanation that Horner had bought the property from the king. They believed that, during the long trek to London, Horner's cupidity had been tested beyond its strength, and that the trusted gentleman had torn a hole in the pie's crust and carefully removed the deed to Mells Park, which thus became the historic 'plum' of the jingle. And so the old rhyme was written and sung lustily in derision of the theft."

One of the finest stories, based on an actual event, I could remember is about a desperately ill boy (tumor inside his spinal cord) who was cured by a surgeon during the Christmas season and made the best of the gifts possible.

The story is titled 'Julian's last Hope' written by John Pekkanen, where the reader comes across a boy named Julian who becomes sick during a Christmas season and the parents are worried to find that the doctors were either rejecting or postponing the case as incurable. But the time comes when the right kind of doctor (Dr Epstein) arrives who takes pains to diagnose the case and cure.

Once again it is Christmas time when the boy pays his respects by playing the violin he so liked. The story ends in the following manner of bliss 'To Dr Epstein, listening to the music flow from the fingers of the talented young man, whose life he had saved, it was a shining, unforgettable moment.

It was, the doctor thought, the most perfect gift he could have received in the most joyous of all seasons, the Christmas.'

Christmas is the time when the little boys and girls in England and elsewhere, have more activities to recreate for they decorate their homes, schools and churches with holly, mistletoe, candles and paper decorations. It is also the time to watch Nativity plays, where the birth and the struggle in the life of Christ is reminded with all its splendour.