Christmas with the Wombles

Since September I’ve been going to a keep-fit class twice a week called ‘Forever Active.’ It’s aimed at those of us who are drawing their pensions but not quite ready to go gently. We throw ourselves round the gym for an hour to music we recognise from the 60s and 70s, hoist a few dumbbells and stop off for fish and chips on the way home.

Now it being Christmas and all, Cathy, our instructor had prepared a Christmas playlist for us today. It put everyone in a party mood. Some even wore Santa hats and reindeer antlers, but I’ve always been a trifle worried about being too much on show so didn’t join in. We had all the old faithfuls, ‘Merry Christmas Everybody,’ ‘Santa Claus is coming to town,’ ‘Jingle Bell Rock.’ You get the drift. And then as we launched into a row of lunges, ‘Wombling Christmas’ came on.

Now this isn’t up there with the well-known Christmas tearjerkers. It’s not Blue Christmas.  It doesn’t get people generally reaching for their hankies and sobbing silently in the corner.

It did for me.

You see, when my daughter was about two, she was well into the Wombles as any self- respecting 80s toddler would be. She had a black and white wooden rocking horse called Ned (what else?) and Ned came in for some pretty hard sweat when she felt up against it. Her favourite pastime in the world was to rock on Ned and sing lustily along to an old LP called ‘The Best of the Wombles.’ It kept her happy for hours. She’s now an international musician and thrills audiences across the world with her virtuoso performances, which just goes to show that my early-years music education wasn’t wasted.

I can still see her now, in my mind’s eye, age two, wombling furiously one dark December day. Her daddy was in hospital which was a big stresser for her as she didn’t really understand why. She had tried very hard to make him better with her Fisher Price doctors kit and it hadn’t worked. So he kept disappearing and everyone was sad.

Now her daddy had been granted hospital leave for just for a couple of days to have some family Christmas time and know what it was like not to live hooked up to tubes and drips on a Dickensian hospital ward. That had been his life since his little girl was born. And that day, as he walked (painfully) through the door, my daughter expressed her complete and utter delight in the only way she knew how, and rocked harder and harder, and sang louder and louder to 'Wombling Merry Christmas.' (Two years later, he died and not all the Wombling in the world brought him back.)

And so, when it started up this morning, I was undone.

Now here is a big shoutout to all of you who are coping with illness and hospitals and operations and sheer, raw fear this Christmas. It's just so very bloody tough, isn’t it?  And lots of lovely people try to make it a bit nicer for you and a bit easier but not all the carols round the tree on earth can make up for the fact that you feel so desperate and furious and powerless as you sit by that bed and weep.

And I was back there this morning.

And, as you know, I grapple constantly with not feeling a good enough Christian, let alone Franciscan but I just needed some help here. Call it prayer if you like. Sometimes I do. And I thought of that first Christmas when there probably weren’t any Wombles in the stable, but there was a tiny baby who changed that scene around the hospital bed for ever and for good. Because that baby was Love personified and that love was so big there was space enough inside for all hurt and fury and pain and sickness to be held very close and redeemed.

St Francis loved Christmas. He saw it as even more important (controversially) than Easter because it was when God came into the world through the humanity of Jesus and changed everything once and for all. The Incarnation - when Jesus became one of us and lived and died and suffered in love. ‘Love came down at Christmas’ says that wonderful poem by Christina Rossetti. The love that holds us through anything and everything and understands when we can’t feel that it’s there but is still there anyway.

So, wherever you are this Christmas, however you feel, whatever Life is throwing at you right now, just remember that you are held in Love. And that is what this season is all about. I know it’s no use saying don’t be afraid – because we are. I am, (most of the time), but never ever forget – we are all, all creation, held in Love.

Even the Wombles.

Nativity scene