Paris and Rouen Mini-Cruise, and Santa-phobia

We took the kids abroad for the second time in their lives this Christmas.

My wife saw a ‘mini-cruise’ advertised in the local paper, at just £99 per person, and we booked up. So that was their present, instead of loads of toys that would break on teh first day.

We boarded the cruise ship (well let’s be honest, it was a cross-channel ferry) on Christmas eve, sailed to France overnight. On Christmas morning it continued up the river Seine to Rouen there was a shuttle bus into the town centre, but everything was closed. The next day after sleeping in our cabins we had a coach trip to Paris which took us to all the major sites before releasing us near Opera. We took the kids on the metro to Sacre Couer, fed them crepes, and dodged the hoards trying to sell us trinkets and friendship breacelets before returning to the ship to sail home overnight.

The on-board entertainment was very good, with live bands, communal carol singing on Christmas day, and so on. My 7 year old boy became known as the one person who would always dance vigorously whatever the song.

The highlight for me was when the kids powers of persuasion overcame my cynicism and Santa-phobia, and we went to the room just in time for them to call out my children’s names, and each one of them was given a good quality age and gender appropriate toy. My Santa-phobia remains strong (He is a vague and misleading South European Christian myth mixed with a North European pagan winter god and coke advert who teaches a doctrine of salvation by works while rewarding the rich more than the poor and also frightening small children along the way, but my main objection is that he displaces Christ as the object of society's affection), but I felt that the tour operators had gone out of their way to give us a good time, and felt really pampered.

Christian Calendar

I have always been brought up with a non-conformist view that much of the so called Christian calendar revolves around the Christianisation of pagan festivals. As Christianity expanded and pagans were converted, they needed a substitute for their pagan days, and something to celebrate when their still-pagan friends were having fun and revelry. I thought that the church took the pagan festivals and applied Christian meanings to them. My parents took a quasi- Jehovah’s Witness position that we really shouldn’t do these things at all, but I have moved away from it saying that the Kingdom of God is advancing and taking ground form the Kingdom of darkness, and I’m not going to let the Devil keep any of it, least of all the fun bits. However, this weekend, while reading the Church of England newspaper, my position has changed again. It was an article regarding the dating of Christmas, which pointed out that neither the winter solstice (21 Dec) nor the Roman Saturnalia (17 Dec) fall on December 25th. The article went on to say that the date of Christmas was derived very early, and was based on an idea prevalent at the time that the OT prophets died on their birthdays. Therefore, having evaluated the date of the crucifixion to be 25th of March, Jesus would also have been born on 25th of March. But since Jesus was a special case. It was his incarnation ie conception that was counted, rather than emergence form the womb. Thus, 9 months later, he was born on 25th December. Now I still think that the fundamental premise about the prophets dying on their birthdays is almost certainly flawed, but it is good to know that the date of Christmas was set based on theological thought rather than simply adopting a pagan festival.

Hibernation

I have too much going on at present, and need to cut out unimportant stuff. This measns I shall have to resist blogging - either writing mine or reading yours - for a while. So until things lighten up - God bless and have a Happy Christmas.

Except Kyle, to whom I wish a blessed Feast of the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Oh, yes, I will also up date you tomorrow about how our carol service went.