To my knowledge the only place to use the word ‘winterval’ of their Christmas celebrations since Birmingham City Council abandoned it 15 years ago is Waterford in Ireland. The brand is tainted, symbolising a cheap and cheerful ‘multiculturalism’ where the only way to make the festive season mean something to everyone was to make it mean almost nothing to anyone.

To be fair to Birmingham City Council, that’s not what they intended, and neither do Waterford. For them, it’s all about the money: “The positive economic impact catalysed by the inaugural Winterval Christmas Festival was suitably illustrated by the 2012 Retail Excellence Ireland figures which revealed a 30 per cent boost in retail sales in the city last December”, reports the Munster Express.

Nevertheless, the ‘someone-is-mucking-about-with-our-Christmas’ story gets traction every. This year, Nottinghamshire Police’s ‘Badvent Calendar’, now renamed a ‘Festive Criminal Calendar’, posts a mug shot of a wanted criminal every day. Christopher Harry Lee Cheetham is our suspect for 10 December – the 44-year-old from Tenby Grove is wanted for failing to appear in court regarding a theft.

The calendar was renamed when members of staff lodged complaints, “many” of which “were on religious grounds”. It was suggested that the calendar was in “poor taste” and “disrespectful to Christians”. Alternatively – according to the Daily Mail’s hilarious headline – the Badvent calendar might be “disrespectful to Christmas”.

It’s not really disrespectful to Christians, but it might well be disrespectful to Christmas, since for the most part what we call advent is a schmaltzy pre-festive booze, food, and shopping binge. It’s a month long Chrismassy count down, fit for any secular Winterval, though sometimes we like to include some saccharine pseudo-religious decoration – a little chocolate Jesus behind the last hatch of your advent calendar. Perhaps people feel that the other 11 months of the year are grim enough, without being reminded of it when they'd prefer to be engaging in seasonal dissipation. 

There’s an irony here, and the fact that no-one has noticed it genuinely is evidence of how secular our celebration of Christmas had become. For Christians, Advent really is a season where you take badness seriously. The ‘advent’ is the arrival of Christ in history, and ‘peace on earth’ is only half of that story. Advent can mean either consolation or judgement, depending on who you are. In Mary’s words, “He has scattered the proud in their conceit, casting down the mighty from their thrones and lifting up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” When Christian’s pray their advent prayer, “Come, Lord Jesus”, they pray for revolution.

So, two and a half advent cheers for Badvent, if it gives us an opportunity to meditate on concepts that have been pretty much expunged from our public discourse – sin, confession and divine judgement – and wonder at their personal and political meaning. Sadly, unlike Badvent, advent asks us if it’s not our faces, in fact, that should populate the Festive Criminal Calendar. The sins might be ours. It could be us that ought to confess. Divine judgement might be coming our way.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says in The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956:

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Paul Bickley is the Director of Political Programme for Theos

Image by the_42nd_dragon from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence