Forty years ago, the great pre-Christmas event in primary schools up and down the country was a television series: six episodes filled with amazing special effects that came out one a week on BBC One. The main characters were all children and the actors appeared on Blue Peter, excitedly talking about what it was like being made to fly (rather dull, I think – you wear a special suit and are attached to wires in a blue studio so they could add the snow-covered scenery later). With them they had some rather wonderful established adult actors including an old Doctor Who and the Shakespearean actor Robert Stephens. The series was an adaptation of John Masefield’s book, The Box of Delights, with which it shares a title, and it is an annual feature of my household, having been part of our Christmas celebrations for as long as my daughters can remember. We climb onto the sofa in the manner of the Simpsons opening credits, realise we haven’t put the DVD in the player, somebody gets down to fix it and then we start again, providing commentary on the life-choices of the characters, criticising the special effects (not all of which have aged well) and cheering for Maria, the gun-toting anti-hero.
The Box of Delights is one of a few family favourites that we have watched together so often that their script forms part of our dialect – they are our traditions, the ways we remind ourselves that we’re a unit, that we communicate with each other in a way perplexing to outsiders – and we’re ok with that. Also on that list are “It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown” – a Snoopy cartoon, “The Snowman” – a Raymond Briggs masterpiece, “The Princess Bride” – canonically accepted as the best movie of all time, and “The Sound of Music”, which, like the Box of Delights, has a lead character called Maria, although this one is less likely to have a pistol about her person.
The Sound of Music is a musical from the 1960s that is based on the true story of the Trapp Family Singers, a family from Salzburg in Austria who escaped from the approaching Nazis in the late 1930s and moved to America, settling down in Vermont where they made a living running musical summer camps and became relatively big stars singing folk songs in close harmony. The first half of the film is an absolute joy but, as with so many things, it goes downhill when the Nazis arrive.
Anyway, over the weekend, one of my trips down the Wikipedia wormhole brought me to a recording of the Carol of the Drum by The Trapp Family Singers which was the first time I think I’ve actually heard them sing (rather than the actors who play them in the film). The Little Drummer Boy, as the Carol of the Drum is also known, is a modern Christmas song composed in 1941 – ok, relatively modern – by an American composer called Katherine Kennicott Davis and the Trapp Family were the first to record it, although it has been done several times since including one rather spectacular version by David Bowie and Bing Crosby which would be a confusing way to be introduced to either artist, for which reason, if nothing else, I recommend it.
The Carol of the Drum sticks in my head because it is used in a Christmas episode of The West Wing (a series I also recommend) in which a homeless army veteran dies on the streets of Washington in a coat one of the characters had donated to charity. The song plays as he is given an army funeral, guns fired over his coffin and over the carol-singing as he is lowered into the ground.
The story of the Little Drummer Boy was pretty much invented by Kennicott Davis to go round the rhythm ru-pa-pum-pum that had got into her head, and a melody that took inspiration from an old Czech carol. It begins with the line “Come, they told me pa-ru-pa-pum-pum” as the little drummer boy is told that he should come and visit the baby Jesus and the key line to my mind is in the final verse when he sings “I played my drum for him, pa-ru-pa-pum-pum, I played my best for him, pa-ru-pa-pum-pum.”
Why is that the key line, you ask, or, at least, should ask. Well, I’ve been wondering about that – I knew it was, but wasn’t sure I could explain why, so I’ve been reflecting on Christmas, and what it means in a school that has no religious roots, and what it means to have no religious roots when many of us here do actually have roots in religion – it’s just we don’t share the same religion, and then I circled back to The Box of Delights, in which the villain is a clergyman, the theme tune is a mash-up of carols and the climax is the singing of O Come All Ye Faithful in the Christmas Eve service at Tatchester Cathedral with a magician who claims to come from pagan times.
Communities tell stories and they make traditions – some of those stories are true, histories of real events, some are entirely fabricated with flying cars and gangsters, and most are somewhere in between, based on a real story but improved in the retelling, a homeless man dying in the icy night brought to our attention via the White House Director of Communications. Some of the traditions are simple, four people gathering on a sofa, and some are majestic – hundreds filling a cathedral, but in the cold and dark of midwinter I think we need our stories and we need our traditions and we need our community, and so I share my traditions with you in the hope that some of you will enjoy The Box of Delights, The Easter Beagle (to be fair, we watch that one in the spring rather than now), The Snowman – and I hope that you will share your traditions with me, pass on recommendations, tell stories – and I hope that you will help support school traditions, support a community that is delighted rather than offended by difference, a community that looks outward, thinks about more than ourselves, a community that recognises that there are those on the streets this winter less fortunate than we are.
Next week we have our school carol service – it’s nowhere near as magnificent as Tatchester Cathedral, being held at the church round the corner where the local community welcome us in to sing together, to listen to poetry, to share and make traditions. It’s next Tuesday, 17th of December at 5pm so you can finish Golden Hour here and then go across. We will be collecting for Crisis at Christmas because we know it’s not only on the streets of Washington that it’s hard to be homeless in midwinter, and because we know that a warm bed is better than rifles fired over a majestic grave. I hope that you’ll come, that you’ll make time and make the effort rather than just going home because it’s easier – and I hope that if the Christmas story isn’t part of your tradition you’ll come anyway because it’s a sad world if we never learn from each other, never enjoy each other’s stories even if we don’t really believe them. And I hope that whatever you do for your community, whether it’s playing your drum, or singing, or reading, carrying music stands, listening, or just being kind, being there, that you’ll do your best – because whatever your religion, whatever you believe, or don’t believe, or are not sure of, or don’t care about, all any of us can do is our best.
And I’m going to pause there because “do your best” can be a cop out. If you fail at something you might say to yourself “well, I did my best” and move on. But did you? Was that actually your best work? Was that the really the best you can do? Did you select the best set of drumsticks? Did you make sure your drum was properly set up before you started? Had you practised, and practised and practised so that when the moment came you were ready? And when it came, did you give it your full attention, ignoring the phone, ignoring your friends, thinking of nothing but you and your drum? Because if you didn’t do those things – or whatever the equivalent is for your tasks – then you didn’t do your best – and if we do less than our best then we’re doing a disservice to all those around us.
Come, they told me, pa-ru-pa-pum-pum.
Footnotes:
1. In Small and Scorching, I promised an assembly with more time given to John Masefield. This doesn't do him justice, but it's a down payment on that promise.
2. Robert Stephens is known to a certain sector of the population (which probably overlaps with 1980s fans of The Box of Delights) as Aragorn from the BBC Radio play of The Lord of the Rings. There didn't seem to be any way of squeezing this fact into the main text.
3. Maria von Trapp gets a more thorough introduction in An Habitual Voyeur.
4. The West Wing, like The Sound of Music is part of the traditional dialect of assemblies. This one references an episode called "In Excelsis Deo" and Toby (the original owner of the coat) is quoted directly in A Quadrichotomy of Values.
5. The challenge of a being a secular school with a multi-faith community is also explored in A Fine Thing.
6. Tatchester is the imaginary county town of the imaginary Tatshire somewhere in the west of England and the magician is Ramon Llull, philosopher, theologian, poet, missionary, Christian apologist whose tomb can be found in Palma de Mallorca.
7. The idea of Christmas being a time for telling stories is one that has already been explored in the unimaginatively named Christmas Stories (which also includes a reference to Masefield and that Box)