Walk Backwards with Me?
Pause the rush at Christmas and let's walk backwards through history | Author Alison Lloyd
Happy Christmastime! It’s a busy season. Stop here for a moment and let time unwind. Scroll down for:
‘It was in the season of Christmas that I came out of my little garden in that field of beeches between the Chilterns and the Thames, and began to walk backwards through history to the place from which Christmas came.’
GK Chesterton, ‘The New Jerusalem’
Walking Backwards for Christmas
What are your Christmas rituals?
Last week I watched a group of small children dressed in white and decked with halos, fidgeting before a Christmas play. They walked single file into the auditorium, with skips of excitement restrained by a kind of solemnity. I’ve seen this before, and I know the halos are just tinsel, but the procession always reaches into my heart and stirs my emotions. It always gets too much for at least one of the children too, who bursts into tears, or freezes with stage fright on the bottom step and blocks up the whole line. Our hearts long for angels, but even pretending to be one can be overwhelming.
Christmas isn’t just a time for rushing down the shopping list and wrapping up the 2024 work year. Walking into the Christmas story can be a deeper thing, in which time almost seems to run backwards, as Chesterton suggests in the quote above.
Even the Goons are up for this idea, sort of! As a comedic aside, the Goons have a sort-of-similar, but much less serious take on Christmas in this song:
Author and filmmaker Ryan Whittaker Smith comments on Chesterton’s words:
‘Our rituals and feast days are the inner workings of a psychological and emotional time machine. To sing “While shepherds watched their flocks at night” is to hum an incantation that might, if we allow it, transport us to a grassy hillside in Judea two thousand years ago…’
’Winter Fire: Christmas with GK Chesterton’
I love this thought. I feel the ‘psychological and emotional time machine’ is what I’m trying to create for myself and for you, i.e. my dear readers, when I write.
Let me sing you an incantation then. Let’s walk backwards for Christmas across the seas of centuries. Here’s a new short story, specially for this season. (I thought about restricting it to subscribers only, but somehow it seemed more Christmassy to make it available to everyone.)
SHORT STORY:
One Night in the Little Same-Old World
‘And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night.’ Gospel of Luke 2:8
I live in a little, old town – everything that happened here, happened a long time back. Same dust gets up our noses as the dust our ancestors are laid in. Same sun and moon overhead. I’d like something new to happen. Grandfather says that’s because I’m young and the young are born hopeful. ‘Wait till you’ve had it knocked out of you,’ he says.
‘By the Romans?’ I’m pretty sure he is afraid of the soldiers, although I don’t like to think it, because it makes him seem lesser. I say it to annoy him.
‘There’s them. Then there’s one winter after another. That’ll do it.’
My fear is that he’s right. That nothing new will happen, except a drought, or a house wall falling down, or a well silting up, or a wolf snooping for the lambs. I hunch my shoulders, resistant.
‘Our job’, says Grandfather, ‘is to keep things best we can.’ Re-mortar the walls, water the flock, ring the pen with thorn branches, keep your watch.
On my first night, everything made me jump. The scratch of a stick when I stretched my legs, the gate creaking against its ropes in a shift of wind. The olive tree bent and muttering like an old man. You don’t notice all the things that rustle in the night until you’re alone with the hills and the sky. Every creeping shadow looks like a wolf. My knife hilt sticks into my ribs when I lean forward.
Now I’m an old hand, almost, and icicles of boredom are forming. I’ve learnt tricks to stay awake – stand up, go for a pee, recite the names of the stars, sing. I sing every tune I can remember.
Especially David’s songs. He was a king, born here in the old days. And he was a shepherd. In his time there were bears after the sheep, the stories go. Grandfather says, if I see one, wake him up. But he thinks the bears are gone. David left this place too. He went off to fight – Philistines it was in those days. I’d like to fight the Romans. Grandfather says don’t be an idiot. But I don’t want to spend my whole life waiting for something to happen, like he has.
We do good work, in Grandfather’s opinion, because the sheep are holy – for the temple in the capital. Maybe. I don’t know how much he believes it and how much is to shut me up. Me, I don’t reckon God notices what goes on out on the hillsides. Here where it’s cold and there’s sheep shit every step. I can smell the sheep – earthy, woolly – behind me in the pen. Doesn’t smell holy. I wouldn’t be interested if I were Him.
Tonight, in a weird trick of the light, the stars are very bright. It looks like there’s a black patch, a silhouette, coming from the ridge of caves on the edge of town. A man it looks like, walking, toward us. Why, in the holy name, would anyone be out…?
I look down to the lee of the wall. Grandfather is slumped asleep, cloak over his face.
The man is getting taller as he approaches. I know everyone in our little town but I don’t recognise him. Might be a stranger, staying at the inn. Might be a thief.
Silent as a bandit, still sitting at my post, I slide my shepherd’s staff down the inside of the wall, poke Grandfather in the shoulder. He stirs. I poke him again, and he pushes the cloak back and looks up, eyes to the stars.
‘It’s not time yet,’ he grumbles.
‘Someone’s coming,’ I hiss.
Grandfather reaches for his staff and he’s on his feet. I feel the warmth of his body at my side, his shoulder behind mine.
The approaching man is tall, really tall. And whatever his cloak is made of, the stars are reflecting off it so he glows. Not kidding. And as he shimmers, the night air prickles over my skin and I get the feeling I’m up against something I’ve never met before. I can feel Grandfather breathing a bit fast and uncertain. I’m beginning to wonder if it mightn’t be smart to run for it, and leave the sheep to themselves. But Grandfather would never do that. So I start to shiver. The wall of the pen doesn’t feel high or wide enough under my butt.
‘Hoy!’ Grandfather says to the man. His voice is scratchy, hoarse. ‘What’s your business?’
‘Don’t be afraid,’ says the man. His face is radiating, warm as a lamp, but brighter. He’s not real, I suddenly think. He’s not a man, I mean. He’s something else.
‘I bring you good news.’ He beams, as if he’s lit up with some enormous happiness.
What’s happened? Have the Romans been struck by lightning? Some long-lost relative come back to throw a feast? That’d be good news.
‘Today,’ he says, pointing up to the village, ‘in the town of David, a Saviour has been born to you. He is Christ the Lord.’
Yeah? Here?
I can hear Grandfather breathing heavy, rasping, like he’s not sure whether to believe this guy or not, like fear is weighing on his chest.
Grandfather doesn’t say anything. But the tall man continues, as if he’s heard the doubt and hope turning over in our hearts, pulsing through us. I’d swear his hair is shining.
‘This will be a sign to you. You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.’
A baby wrapped in cloth is nothing special – Bethlehem’s got a few of those. We were all one once. But far as I know, none of the village women are close to time just now. And a manger – who’d put their baby in a feed-stall for animals? Unless they had nowhere else. I feel for the little tyke. I know more than I want about dirt and poverty.
I’m wondering why this guy has bothered to bring this information and what it has to do with us.
Then suddenly, the sky bursts into flame, white flame from horizon to horizon, hill to stony hill. And the stars begin to sing. I don’t remember the tune. It isn’t a tune that people could sing. It’s a song for stars, as if they’d been waiting a long, long time, for ages of silence, watching the world in all its hopes and sadness, sheep and wolves, babies and old men, going through the generations, and now at last the moment has come. The veil of the sky tears and heaven spills out all over.
Glory to God in the highest!
Those are the words.
Glory to God in the highest.
I can feel them all through me, eerier than a horn echoing around the mountains. I am standing in a rain of falling stars and song, shredded with awe. At the back of my mind, I am wordlessly grateful for my miserable job. If it wasn’t for watching the sheep I wouldn’t be here now.
Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace to men, on whom his favour rests.
On whom his favour rests. Of all the people in the world, I hear this. I can’t believe my luck.
We stand a long time, while the light and the song fade. Grandfather is shaking his head, like something is bothering him.
‘Angels?’ I whisper.
He nods.
I wasn’t imagining it then.
He taps me with his staff. ‘Well, let’s go.’
‘Where?’ I’m hoping it will all come back.
‘Into the village.’ He tips his head to Bethlehem. ‘Let’s see this thing that’s happened. The Christ.’
‘Can we leave the sheep?’
Grandfather is unlatching the gate, then retying the thongs behind him. ‘Since the Lord has told us.’
Us. Told us. Yes, we can leave the animals. They’re the Lord’s sheep after all. He’s given us the go-ahead.
This is what I was waiting for. What we all were waiting for.
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Wishing you a blessed, peaceful, happy Christmas and New Year. I look forward to bringing you more thought-stirring, heart-warming history and fiction in 2025. Really I do. Let’s find the meaning under all the bustle and gift-wrap.
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". Our hearts long for angels, but even pretending to be one can be overwhelming." 'Nuff said
Wonderful variety of comments in your scroll about Xmas. Love the humour & your short story. A very creative contribution to the culture of Xmas Thankyou