‘What kind of message are you guys trying to send with that brutal Christmas card?’ asked my friend in the bar last night. He’s referring to the above card, an image created by ‘Castro’ for the Christmas special edition of the Spectator (which you can download here) to run alongside Paul Wood’s stunning diary from Lebanon. It is a discomforting image, but the Christmas story is supposed to be discomforting. Over the years, it has been sentimentalised into a story of comfort, joy and Mariah Carey. But the original Bible story is pretty brutal.
The image in our 2014 card (in more detail below) shows Mary, Joseph and the newborn baby. But instead of a stable, they’re in an era of tower blocks destroyed by war. Bleak, perhaps, but to me it sums up the side of the Christmas story that no one talks about nowadays. The story of the Nativity is about light, arriving in darkness – and there was plenty of the latter.
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