A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 10: Let there be Light

To end my Christmas card musings I have this beautiful one from my alma mater, Spurgeon's College.  Blessed with a hilltop location and what amounts to an English country house as its main building, the College does not have to work hard to prepare an outwardly beautiful card (though when I lived in the building here it was certainly less salubrious on the inside).

The College does not have to work hard to produce a beautiful scene but someone has been working hard on Photoshop here.  Though perhaps not quite hard enough.

Here's what nearby (real) snow looks like on a dark scene:

And here's the mistiness you get at a distance when snow is falling:

That white airbrush layer of card snow just doesn't quite do it, does it?

But who's to complain - I love snow, even fake snow.  

Then there are the room lights.

What is remarkable here is that you can see more clearly through the unlit windows than through the allegedly lit ones!  The latter look like, well, yellow paint. Which they are, in a pixelian sense. Poor old Photoshop.  It works best when you don't really look at it.

But what is all this about?

As we prepare for 2016 this is what it is about - the desire for the picture postcard.  In pursuit of this houses will be expensively bought, vacations expensively taken, divorces expensively executed, medical procedures expensively undergone and children expensively tutored.  We cannot be content with a thin layer of real snow or a real beauty that isn't shining enough.

Yet photoshopping life does not lead to more beauty but fake beauty which can, at a deeper level, yield less beauty.  May God grant us that most elusive of Christian values in the 21st Century West: contentment.

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 9:

Considering the number of religious buildings that are in the Biblical nativity scene (zero) it is of more than passing interest how many appear on Christmas cards, usually in the snow.  How easily the meaning of God becomes architectural, a misfortune that is almost as old as religion itself.  When Peter saw Christ transfigured on the mountain his immediate reaction was a desire to build.

This card looks a little snowy but this may be a trick of desert light.  It's a great card and full of buildings behind the holy family.  But wait . . . what are those buildings?

Apart from the stable, Bethlehem clearly has an inn and one or two of the buildings could pass for that.  Less understandably the Judean hill town might have acquired a lighthouse over to the left.  Is there a mosque there?  No, that would be a few hundred years early.  There are certainly two churches, judging by the crosses on the towers.

No, hang on.  Churches?  Crosses?  It's like announcing a birth with the babe's obituary!

Thus, inadvertently, this card profoundly reflects the meaning of Christmas as the angel described it - You will call his name Jesus ['God saves'] for he will save his people from their sins.  The nativity has no meaning apart from the cross, and the cross no meaning apart from the body of people - the Church - that it wins for heaven from the darkness of sin.

Out of a card's chronological confusion we see light.

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 8: Star Child!

Admittedly the babe appears here to be the child of two aliens.

But the truth is more amazing than that . . .

Happy Christmas!!

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 7: What if?

On Christmas night we are bound to wonder.  Hopefully we can wonder at other things than this card makes us wonder, for perhaps it makes us wonder . . .

1. What if the wise men had ignored the star and Santa had been called in to bring the presents instead - would he have followed the star?
2. What if Jesus had been born in St Freda's church tower - how would the star have appeared?
3. What if we all had the kind of tread that gives Santa's boots such amazing grip on the rooftops?
4. What if all the trees in the town had the same evergreen fertiliser that the ones near Santa seem to have?
5. What if, instead of being created by God, the stars of the universe and their positioning had been left to a wallpaper designer?
6. What if there were no demand for Christmas cards - how would the kind of artist that drew this make a living?

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 6: In the Woods

As Christmas Day draws near the calendar of events is more back story and less must-be-done.  This offers the chance to take time doing things that one normally has no time to do.  

Like working out what this picture is.

Yes, here we have a card with snow on it.  Plus some trees, an owl, a brace of white rabbits (one caught, one waiting to be) and a man who appears to have gone outside in his mother's winter nightgown carrying a wreath.  It is not an easy card to understand.

Investigation leads to the Facebook page of Liz, the artist, who appears to draw great pictures and craft work sometimes relating to fantasy themes and enjoy drinking in South Dakotan bars.  And eventually the picture is uncovered as:

Arctic Santa in Forest

Yet the sense of discovery that this gave me was quickly lost in a flood of unanswered questions:

• What other kind of Santa is there but an Arctic one?
• Why has the reindeer turned into an owl?
• Why is this dubious Santa wearing his Mum's nightgown?
• Why doesn't he catch the other rabbit to make a decent Christmas meal?
• And why has he stolen someone's Christmas wreath?

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 5: The Mouth Speaking

The first thing that struck me about these two cards was how beautiful they were, though they are very different paintings and arrived on different days.  On the face of it the Nativity and a rural snow-scene are the least remarkable of pictures on a Christmas card but something about these is special.  

On turning to the back of them it becomes all the more amazing yet also more explicable.  These are both copies of paintings by mouth artists.  The painstaking attention they exhibit derives from the challenge that the artist faces in delivering any painting and the relative care and pride in the work they do.

This is somewhere near the beauty of the painstaking gift of God at Christmas. 

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 4: The Invisible God

Unsurprisingly I have a leaning toward cards with a text of Scripture.  As this one proudly announces - this is the message that really matters.

And the card has a splendid text too: Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father! [John 14:9 TLB]   There is a disappointment to come however.  For when you turn over and look at the picture . . .

there is merely a manger with a some hay, some sheep and a something resembling some wheat in a white vase.  So the Father remains - at least in terms of this card - as mysterious and unseen as ever!

Perhaps the card company might extend its strap line to when the message really matters the picture does too.

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No. 3: Angel Bird

Starting at the top of this Christmas card it is immediately apparent that this is the standard picture of an angel accompanying the star over Bethlehem.  We don't really know about angel wings but as angels sometimes appear in the sky and move swiftly the wings are a reasonable bet.

So far so good.

But wait - is it an angel?  Is it a plane?  It's a bird!!

It's all about perspective but in this picture that is one BIG bird.  A perfectly decent image biblically - Noah's Ark, various prophets and Psalms, a symbol of the Holy Spirit at Christ's Baptism and so on.  But perhaps the artist who drew this forgot that in the birth narratives of Jesus the only doves are dead ones, offered as a sacrifice when the newborn is taken to the Temple.  That dove needs to be careful . . .

A Second Look at a Christmas Card: No 2 The Donkeys

Today a fairly dreadful report has decided that the UK should officially not be Christian.  This idea seems a sad misreflection on the fact that the UK we live in owes almost everything in its better aspects of identity to the Christian faith.  

Christmas Cards are well ahead of the game on this issue however as can be seen here:

Without question this is a Christmas picture.  There's the Middle Eastern town in the background, the night sky with the great star (albeit in the wrong place) and the stable, the hay and the donkeys.  It reminds me of one of those holiday photographs (though this is a painting) when, in trying to capture the yacht passing the pier you end up with a seagull or a passing steam train is missed and you have a piece of fencing instead.

Dame Butler-Sloss (not for the first time unfortunately) did it, the Christmas card did it, I must remember to keep centred on what it's all really about - because I too might do it and end up, in the long run, looking like an ass.

A Second Look at a Christmas Card: No 1. The Done Deal

It's that time of year when (we hope) many Christmas cards arrive.  And when I try to look at them twice - or more - because they are always more interesting than they first appear.  If only because some are so howlingly mismade!

The very first card we received (yesterday) had a very nice picture of children in the snow and at first and second glance appeared to offer nothing for an eagle-eyed blogger to blog about.  Then I looked at the back.

Maybe I'm naive, but on first reading I took it that the friend who bought this card led, by that purchase, to a small donation being given to Sue Ryder, the wonderful Hospice Charity.  But look again.  Morrisons (who have a very happy and generous relationship with SueRyder it has to be noted) have decided to give £50,000.  That's it.  If they sell a zillion cards or none at all that is the deal.  In fact, as far as I can tell, the best thing to do is to buy a card from a SueRyder Shop as that gives the Charity extra money and they'll get the £50,000 anyway!