Bedlam

Is there time to write a blog today?  Has anyone time to read it?  The last working/full shopping day before Christmas weekend.  It's bedlam!

But then Christmas always is bedlam [a place, scene, or state of uproar and confusion].  The roads are bedlam, the shops are bedlam, the church is bedlam and the home is bedlam!

Though in a way the problem is that they are not bedlam.  The word's association with chaotic situations derives from the Bethlem Hospital in London which was, in fact, a lunatic asylum of such grandeur that it became a tourist attraction.  Unfortunately it was not an attraction for those confined within and their miserable environment was both the voyeuristic draw and the derivation of the name for chaos as bedlam. 

Originally it began as Christian foundation and the Order that ran it was named, of course, after the place and the event that the other sort of late-December bedlam ostensibly celebrates but more often buries beneath its confusion.

Thus the answer to Christmas bedlam is, well, Bedlam.  Caught neatly, I think, in the folk carol Joly Wat that feels more like the first Bedlam where the Prince of Peace was found.

Whan Wat to Bedlem cumen was,

He swet, he had gone faster than a pace;

He found Jesu in a simpell place,

Betwen an ox but and an asse.

Ut hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.

‘Jesu, I offer to thee here my pipe,

My skirt, my tar-box, and my scrip;

Home to my felowes now will I skip,

And also look unto my shepe.’

Ut hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.