Festive spirit

Each year the same thing happens. Each year we’re expected to suspend for a month the exercise of sound musical judgment as we’re engulfed, willingly or otherwise, in a deluge of Christmas Music. All of a sudden, banality in various guises becomes completely acceptable. Every church in the land that hasn’t descended to the satanic realms of happy-clappy mass hysteria and which has a half-decent choir offers its own version of King’s College’s Nine Lessons and Carols in cosy, twinkly, feelgood candlelight, pretending that all is well in the world. All the major concert halls in every large city offer Christmas concerts of various hues, swelling the coffers of entrepreneurs like Raymond Gubbay. Local choral societies give their inevitable Messiahs, capable or not. And all around the country in our nation’s primary schools mums burst into tears at the sight of their precious ones draped in tea towels and singing ‘Little Donkey’ at the Nativity play.