The re-birth of the Season

Just when you thought it was all over for Advent, a German newspaper has been carrying an advert from Ricoh: 'Ricoh wishes you a happy Advent'. Not in England, surely? But Die Welt and The Guardian have both run their own versions of an Advent calendar, even if in the form (at least d .W.) of a daily prize-competition.

Some sense appears to be returning to a proper celebration of Christmas too. The Telegraph has a useful article by Baroness Sayeeda Warsi ('the Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion and Social Action'!), entitled 'Christmas is for everyone to celebrate', rejecting secularists' frostiness, and emphasising that Muslims have no objections to Christians celebrating Christmas at all. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=Y14LVDZM3THQXQFIQMFSFGGAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/opinion/2007/12/23/do2311.xml;

The Guardian, too, celebrates 'the Magic of Carols', with contributions from A N Wilson, Trevor Phillips and Alain de Botton, and makes the really interesting observation that 'Carol singing doesn't just cheer up a bleak midwinter - it's the nearest thing we've go to a shared folk-music'. Precisely: Christmas, which has shaped the Western year for much of its history, is also the national annual mid-winter folk-festival of the Family, and of the Child. So perhaps, when children are being re-enslaved around the world - to bonded or forced labour, and to military service elsewhere, to the consumerism of State and nurseries here - it is critical to encourage a re-naissance of celebration of the birth of the Holy Child Jesus: in Bethlehem, and everywhere.

At the same time, Die Welt reminds its readers that the French philosopher Robert Redeker was issued with a fatwa [death-threat] a year ago for calling Mohammed 'the master of hate' in Le Figaro in September 2006; and the final issue of Der Spiegel for 2007, just out, is entitled 'The Koran: the most powerful book in the world'.

Philip S