The Wonders of Christmas Cards 7: Where did you get that hat?

My favourite card this year wins the day for its utter daftness.  It is impossible to look at without it smiling.  Perhaps it is no surprise that it was sent to us by someone who smiles a lot themselves.

When you look at this picture, and after you've smiled, this is the question for Christmas Day - why could this picture only be on a Christmas card?

The car could be on any card except a serious Thinking of you kind of card.  The dogs could be on any fun card.  The background scene is quite Christmassy but could be on several other types of card - Thank You, Birthday, etc. 

As far as I can tell, what makes this a Christmas picture is the dog's Santa hat.

Headwear can be an accessory but as it is so close to a face and so visible it makes a big impact - in the recent cold spell I noticed that all manner of men in woolly hats look largely the same age whether they are in their 30s or 70s.

The baby born today grew up to be a man and we only have one record of his headwear.  One day he was given a crown of thorns, his coronation as king.  And on a cross hung the crowned king from Christmas, the Saviour of sinners.  In the partying we must find room for a prayer.

The holly bears a prickle,

As sharp as any thorn,

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

On Christmas Day in the morn.

The Wonders of Christmas Cards 6: Let's turn to Carol number . . . .

Singing Angel is the name of this picture - it's on the back of the card, trust me.  It has holly on its head - I think this may be a misunderstanding of holy, holy, holy which angels are known to use.

The angel is singing from a book.

This strikes me as very strange.  Truth be told I know pretty much all the basic Christmas Carols off by heart after just a few decades of Christmases.  What's with this angel which has had far longer (if heaven works like that which I don't think it does) to learn the words and the music?  Maybe it's a junior angel, still learning the material?  Still, you'd have thought they'd have used the senior angels for something as important as Christmas . . .

The Wonders of Christmas Cards 5: What's the point?

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.

We speculate as to the nature of the star that appeared to the wise men.  We don't think the shepherds have anything to do with the star (they saw angels) but few Christmas artists seem to care about that detail.  On this card the shepherds have seen the star:

Few cards I have ever seen have a star quite so luminous as this one.  I'm surprised, given its brightness, that the wise men could look at it at all unless they had glasses with special lens.

Given that the star in this picture has transformed into something nearer a portent of Armageddon the mystery is why the shepherd is pointing at it.  If his mate can't see THAT star he has a real problem.

Having noticed this it occurs to me that a great deal of Christian effort at Christmas is similar however - pointing at the blazingly obvious.  Whole school nativities are presented portraying a season dedicated to animals (as far as I can tell a nativity with live animals cannot have any animals as the only ones mentioned in Scripture - sheep - were left in the fields), or dedicated to babies.  Babies are not the solution but the problem I think, growing up in sin and needing the blazingly obvious real Christmas focus - a Saviour. 

The Wonders of Christmas Cards 4: Religion? Pah!!

Understandably perhaps I am a little wedded to the nativity story on Christmas cards.  But snowy church scenes are nice enough.  I am a good Baptist though, and tolerant of others foibles about such things. so that the wonderful world of nature or great celebratory designs are appealing in their way.   There are cards, however, that stretch even the tolerant mind to that simplest of all questions, "Why?"  Here's three so far.

Do you think about snow angels at Christmas?  No, I thought not.  But at least we know what they look like if we see one.  Or is that a picture of a Maker of Snow Angels?

Ah yes, the Christmas unicorn with toadstools.  The what?

This seems to be Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer going to a party as a cow pat with holly growing from its head.

So let's say it again - people are so different and we can't expect everyone to have an eye on the Bible or the Church at Christmas.

The first card, to be fair, comes from a Jewish friend: it is amazingly kind of her to send us a card at all.

The second card, to be fair, comes from one of Sarah's Uni friends: can't expect her to think nativity!

The third card comes from a Baptist Minister . . . !

The Wonders of Christmas Cards 3: DANGER!!!!

Look, I've no idea why the shepherds are looking at those birds, and I've no idea where baby Jesus has gone.  But I'm just glad he doesn't seem to be in that stable because any minute now the lamp is going to set the hay alight and those lambs are going to be toast (sorry, roast).

The Wonders of Christmas Cards 2: Angelic Supination

So often Christmas cards raise complicated theological problems and this one is just of that kind.  Dwelling as spirits and unfallen in sin angels remain tantalisingly familiar and unfamiliar to us.  From time to time - Christmas was such a time - angels are known among mankind.  Known or unknown they are able to assume human form and many of us, myself included, have had a moment or moments when we wonder whether the mysterious person we met was, in fact, an angel.

Although the Bible does not specifically reveal it to us we assume that angels are quite fit and well.  If pain and disease is consequential of the Fall they could only assume a failing human body, surely, for a particular divine purpose.  Enter this Tearfund Christmas card:

Even a cursory, non-medical look at those feet discloses a real problem.  Have you ever seen feet more turned in (supinated) than this? 

There's no operation for it.  Most usually it is treated by the use of insoles or built up footwear.  Here we see the serious problem this angel faces because it doesn't wear footwear, flies a lot and anyway is a spirit.  As far as I can see this is untreatable.

The Wonders of Christmas Cards 1. Foot(hoof)prints

Any reader of this blog will know that come December I cannot resist offering some examples of the weirdness of Christmas cards.  Long before I blogged, in that other age when 'post' involved red boxes rather than blue buttons on screen, I always tried to find something interesting about every card we received.   I learned that a second look often finds amazing things.  Here's one from the first batch we received this week (some senders are very efficient!),

It's a fine picture, with three fine camels.  The stable is even further from the town than it usually is (why is it often positioned far from the houses like a country bus stop?) but that is quite a routine card issue.  My attention is drawn to the hoof marks in the sand.

A set of them confirm that the first camel has hoofed it from the desert.  But the  second camel?  Has it been walking exactly in the hoof marks of camel number one?  Because there are no more hoofmarks behind it than behind the first one.  And camel 3 must be doing the same because there are no spare hoofmarks around it either.

Many of us must know the moving but now overused prose poem Footprints.  It tells of how the Christian sees footprints in the sand where God and (s)he have walked together and a section, when life was tough, where a set disappear.  Had God left?  No, he's carried the believer in those times.

Maybe the first camel had carried the other two?