O come all ye faithful

A scientist Christian, a retail management expert, a Jew and a Muslim tell The THES what Christmas means to them

JOHN POLKINGHORNE, recently retired as president of Queens' College, Cambridge. His most recent book is Beyond Science.

Family and Christianity will be the staple of my Christmas, as they have been for many years.

The central meaning of Christmas lies in the mysterious, exciting (and I believe, true) idea that God has become known to us by living the life of a man in Jesus Christ. Scientists like profound ideas and one could hardly have one deeper than that. My motivations for this belief lie in interpreted and recorded experience, broadly comparable to the basis for my scientific belief in the quark structure of matter.

On Christmas Eve, my wife Ruth and I will be at the midnight mass in our parish church. In fact, I shall be preaching as part of my continuing priestly ministry as a kind of part-time curate. We are enjoying the life of an ordinary parish again after ten years of college chapel, where the congregation has a narrow age range and disappears as soon as one of the great festivals is on the horizon. I shall want to talk about the incarnation as God's sharing of the pain and precariousness of creation. If the cross speaks to us of divine participation in human suffering, the baby in the manger signifies God's acceptance of vulnerability. The Christian God is no distant despot but, in A. N. Whitehead's words, "a fellow sufferer who understands''.

We shall spend Christmas day with our elder son and his family, the New Year with our daughter's family, but contact with our younger son and his wife in Australia will have to be telephonic only. This year all of us in England, barring the two-year-old twins, will go to the pantomime together, the kind of jaunt for which grandchildren provide a welcome excuse.

Christmas is also a time for memories and I shall think of my mother and father, brother and sister, now departed this life. I am a gardener and there will be some thoughts of the coming spring, together with some regrets that a spell working in New York will prevent my seeing the first flowering of the many bulbs I planted this autumn to rejuvenate a garden that has been in the hands of tenants for seven years.

ROBERT GRAFTON SMALL, honorary reader in the school of management at Keele University

"Christmas reminds us all of what we most truly and deeply believe in. I refer, of course, to money." American satirist Tom Lehrer's ironic observation on the commercialisation of Christmas has lost none of its force in the 30-odd years since, least of all for the retail trade, writes Huw Richards.

"For some retailers, such as toy shops, Christmas accounts for the bulk of the year's business," says Robert Grafton Small. Some other goods can only be sold in the weeks before Christmas - cards, gift tags and wrapping paper with specific seasonal themes become virtually unsaleable from close of business on December 24.

And just about the only certainty for traders is that Christmas will occur in late December. "There is no way of knowing in advance what will sell. Tastes and fashions can vary enormously from year to year. It is obvious that children's tastes are changeable, but adults can be pretty unpredictable as well. One year computer games may be the fashion, the following year it might be CDs, the next year something else again. Shops have to make their decisions in advance and hope they are right. By the time they know the answers - and getting it right can be extremely lucrative - it is probably too late to do much about it."

This, he suggests, accounts for the general belief that Christmas starts earlier every year. "When so much is invested in Christmas, it is understandable that manufacturers and retailers make as much effort as possible to publicise their goods - possibly on occasions to a counter-productive extent, as the public gets fed up with the advertising and refuses to buy the goods," he says.

Unpredictability and the need to order also help explain the annual scrambles that occur as particular items prove unpredictably good sellers. The Buzz Lightyear doll from the Disney film Toy Story was perhaps more predictable as a seller than the furore two years ago over an item linked to the veteran television series Thunderbirds, but has still had the retailers scrambling for scarce stocks. "That is an example of the retailers perhaps being a little cautious in ordering after a couple of relatively slow years," says Grafton Small. Regional variations in demand can also have odd consequences - London toyshops have been receiving calls from American customers desperate to obtain US-manufactured items that have sold out in the home market.

Stock is not the only element of uncertainty. Shop layouts frequently have to be rearranged to accommodate new lines, and temporary staff taken on to cope with extra demand. Add in the increased volume of customers in the same space and it is hardly surprising that shops in the final weeks before Christmas can be chaotic and frustrating places. "You have temporary casual staff whose quality and skills vary enormously, goods that may never have been seen in that shop before and more people on the premises than at any other time of the year."

If it drives you mad, think what it does to retailers - who have to reckon with all of this, plus the knowledge that a few wrong or merely unlucky guesses may do lasting damage to their business.

DAVID CESARANI, professor of modern Jewish history, Southampton University, and director, the Wiener Library, London.

By the time most readers of The THES are starting the 12 days of Christmas I will be recovering from the eight days of Hanukkah, the Festival of Light. This is one of the happier events in the Jewish calendar, commemorating the victory of the Maccabees over the idolatrous Hellenisers and the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem.

Children love it because a new candle is lit for each day of the festival until the hanukiyah is ablaze with nine coloured candles. It has become customary to give children presents and chocolate money, hanukkah gelt, which is used when playing a traditional game with dredls, or spinning tops. For a week our little boy will have gorged on doughnuts and latkes, potato pancakes, which are Jewish seasonal fare. But the nightly excitement and numerous hanukkah parties take their toll on adult nerves.

Orthodox Jews try to ignore Christmas, but I have a soft spot for it. When I was a child, Pesach (Passover) and Christmas were the two occasions in the year when my entire family would gather together. Later I would spend Christmas with dear friends who blended Polish, Bavarian and Jewish traditions into a magical and delicious mixture.

This year we will join a traditional and much loved Christmas Eve party held by old friends. We will spend Christmas Day quietly with another Jewish family working our way through a festive hamper and playing crockinole, a Canadian parlour game. On Boxing Day I will make an early morning raid on the sales, another long-established tradition. But in the afternoon I will be leading a workshop in the winter study programme at Edgware Masorti (Conservative) Synagogue. My topic will be "The Jewish road to revolution": the half-forgotten tradition of Jewish radicalism from Isaiah to Rosa Luxemburg.

If we can arrange babysitting I hope to go out to see a film one evening with my wife. Otherwise, I will be taking advantage of the vacation and the holiday closure of the Wiener Library to get some writing done. Unless, that is, there is a good film on TV.

AKBAR AHMED, fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge, is making a film and writing a book about Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan

Living as a Muslim in a Christian culture, the season of good cheer and jolly spirits reaching a climax on Christmas day usually rouses in me a maelstrom of emotions: a moroseness, reflectiveness and a sense of alienation. It is a time of drawing in and closing of doors.

Coming from South Asia where festivals tend to be inclusive, drawing in not only neighbours but strangers, alienation is at its deepest during Christmas. On the face of it this is a paradox. Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus. That he is one of the most respected figures in Islam is not widely recognised in Britain.

In a world of contradictory movements, religions both bring people together and divide them. Religious enthusiasm - or the revivalism of the media - is apparent in every major world religion.

In its extreme form it can take a violent shape. Religious fanaticism encouraged the tearing down of the mosque at Ayodhya in India, drove Christians into unmentionable acts of barbarism in the Balkans and Jews into doing terrible things to Arabs in Israel. We have examples of Muslim violence in the Middle East - very often Muslims killing Muslims.

Yet there are societies where people of different faiths have come together. Britain provides one example. However serious the problems of integration - and we must not pretend that they do not exist - British society is more plural and mixed than ever before. The definition of British culture is undergoing serious change. At the heart of this are binding rituals such as Christmas.

For me as a Pakistani there is no better example of the tolerance that the spirit of Jesus should evoke than that of Jinnah, founder of Pakistan and its first governor-general. In the only Christmas he celebrated in Pakistan, months before he died, he spent the December 25 - his own birthday - with the Christian community in Karachi.

Reports of the persecution of Pakistani Christians show how far Pakistan has moved from his ideals. In celebrating Christmas we need to go back to the spirit of the man at the centre of it: Jesus. We need to remember that his world view was all-encompassing, to pause and reflect about the true meaning of our existence.

So enjoy the season of good cheer and remember: if you have a neighbour who is not quite like you in culture and colour, go across and invite him or her in. They would certainly be pleased to celebrate the birth of the extraordinary world figure Christmas commemorates.