Forgiving Slade

Does your granny always tell ya' that the old songs are the best?

Indeed she does — O Come All Ye Faithful, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Mary's Boy Child, O Holy Night and my favourite of them all, The Shepherds' Farewell. Yes, they're the best.

Truth is, I love Christmas.  I love Christmas trees, Christmas turkey, Christmas presents, Christmas cards from family and treasured friends, Christmas crackers and silly hats, Christmas carols from Kings College and Christmas pudding with brandy sauce. Into the damp, cold, short days around the Winter Solstice, Christmas beams light and happiness and good fun. Consequently, my Christmas Tree goes up soon after Advent Sunday. By Twelfth Night it will be quite bedraggled, but I love it anyway; as does my well-behaved moggy Tommy - the first cat I've had who can be trusted with all those decorative balls.

Yes, if Christmas didn't exist, it would surely have to be invented.

However, I definitely don't love the over-commercialisation of Christmas and the unremitting pressure to spend more than I have on things neither I nor my loved ones really want. But that, I tell myself, is the price for living in a capitalist society, and I wouldn't willingly swap it for anyone else's system. As far as profit-hungry retailers are concerned, any excuse will do. Mothers' Day, Easter and Halloween (yuk!) get similar treatment, but Christmas is the Grand Daddy of them all.

For me, and for many like me, Christmas also has a strong religious importance, perfectly summed up in these lines from Charles Wesley's famous carol:

Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see;

hail the incarnate Deity;

Pleased as man with man to dwell,

Jesus, our Emmanuel.

I am not, however, naive enough to believe that Christmas should solely be a Christian festival. It may indeed be The Reason for the Season, but folk were marking the Winter Solstice long before Christianity reached these shores. Truth be told, Easter is more significant for Christians. The birth of Jesus isn't even mentioned in two of the four Gospels, whilst the prolific St Paul half-mentioned it just once – But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman... (Galatians 4.4). The rest, truth be told, is hype.

Then she's up and rock 'n' rollin' with the rest.

Photo: Alastair Lightly

I've oft been heard to remark that Slade have a lot to answer for! For weeks now it's been almost impossible to shop in a supermarket or department store without hearing them singing:

Are you hanging up your 

stocking on the wall?

Are you hoping that the snow 

will start to fall?...

Tesco have even tried to make a joke of it in one of their more nauseating Christmas commercials. If a Christmas song has ever been done to death, it's surely that one...  or is it?

Well here's our ukulele group – the amazing Ukes 'uv Azzard – busking in Coleford last Saturday. I'm third from the left. Despite it being a bitterly cold morning, we're thoroughly enjoying ourselves and enthusiastically singing, among other Christmas numbers, yes... you guessed it, Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody. And I have to admit that having sung it, rather than just listened to it, it's a great song. The good folk of Coleford clearly agreed, as that open ukulele case was soon filling up with donations for our local hospice, which is surely what the Christmas Spirit is really all about.