Competition 3429 invited you to tell the story of the Nativity in the style of a well-known writer. There were very many excellent passages, enough to fill this column three times over, but as it is the £25 vouchers go to the following. Thanks for all your lovely entries this year and happy Christmas one and all.
To begin at a new beginning: he was birthed, berthed in a barn with gert bulks of shifting, breathy beasts. Joseph would sooner have been up the pub, sheets to the wind, but it was no more the establishment to encourage the fulfilment of dreams than prophecies. At his own wordless dreamings, the little wet racket of a tike in the crib scarcely noticed his visitors that long night. Pompous Kings and grumbly shepherds (it was cold out, man) came and went. No Uncles, mind, this wasn’t Wales. From above, songs of angelic hosts shimmered a consoling strange. His mother was there, spent as last week’s wages, fulfilled as the promise of rain in Fishguard. Feeding her babby, she smiled imagining what the fishwives back home would say if they knew she’d borne a Saviour in her tummy this long way. The beasts, at prayer or stool, fell unearthly silent.
Adrian Fry (Dylan Thomas)
We stole a burro for the woman. It was near her time. The town was full of people. All the posadas were full, but we found a barn. That’s where she had the baby. Soon a big group of trabajadores from the fields came. They said they had been sent. But the big surprise was the three men. High-ups. Crowns on their uniforms. Maybe from the East.
They said they had been to the palace. ‘Madre de Dios!’ said the woman. ‘What did he say?’
One of the men spat. ‘He is nothing. No cojones. We spun a tale about astrology and he believed it. But he told us spy on you and come back. We’re going home a different way.’
They gave the woman some gold and some pharmaceuticals. ‘For the niño,’ they said. ‘That hijo de puta at the palace could be a killer.’
‘Hombres!’ said old José.
Brian Murdoch (Ernest Hemingway)
For the reasons why the child was born, see my previous XXXIX volumes. As to how the child came into the world, ma’am, you will have a better notion than any man, even famed Dr. Slawkenbergius. My father was pleased to see that His mattress was of hay, rather than feathers or horsehair, it being his theory that hay was auspicious; not so his name, for yod is an ill beginning, being, as any but the merest dunce will understand, no better than an ‘I’ writ small – mixed fortunes. Ox, ass, shepherds – all much alike – a star – the twenty-fifth day of December, I – O diem praeclarum! – don’t fly off, sir, there is more to say – I wish to inform your worship that there were angels singing – Pseudo-Dionysius confirmed – Pseudo-who, you ask? – lisez, lisez, lisez, donc! No bed, alas, because Mr Toby Shandy had taken its timbers for breastwork.
Frank Upton (Laurence Sterne)
You’ve seen it in school plays, the lovely Nativity. But the Grinch did not like it, the whole fun activity! The story of Mary at Bethlehem-Ville, her riding a donkey, it made the Grinch ill. The manger, the shepherds, the twinkling star, the Grinch thought this stuff was a fable too far. The gold, myrrh and frankincense (tricky to spell), the Wise Men and camels, it made the Grinch yell: ‘I hate the Nativity! This thing must go! If I was the innkeeper, I would say NO!’ The stable, the angels who sang with their trumpets, he hated the story, he campaigned to dump it. But the birth of the baby, in a cowshed with hay, made the Grinch’s small heart grow three sizes that day. So the Grinch caught the spirit of seasonal positivity, and the Grinch – he himself! – went to see the Nativity!
Janine Beacham (Dr Seuss)
Bethlehem was a one-horse town that had lost its horse. The woodworker arrived at dusk, dragging a mule with a dame who looked ready to drop the whole human race there in the dust. She was class: quiet, tired, and nine months gone. No room at the inn. The schmuck innkeeper gave them the stable because stables don’t ask questions or take bribes. Night fell hard. The kid arrived like a .38 slug: fast, messy, no silencer. The cattle lowed, the mule sighed and a cheap lantern swung like a harlot’s hips. Shepherds came, stinking of sheep and cheap wine. Then three high-rollers: silk robes, faces like tax attorneys. Some kind of shady deal went down involving gold and other valuables. They eyeballed the baby and blew town before dawn. The kid slept through it all. I was worried for the broad, but I guess that’s just my saviour complex.
Joseph Houlihan (Raymond Chandler)
The story of the Nativity, although undoubtedly important to Christians, if less so to those of other faiths or none, tends to induce a general feeling of déjà vu, if not actual boredom. Nevertheless, since few outside my own family are aware of the connection, not close but confirmed definitively by the College of Heralds, between the Powells and Joseph of Arimathea, this fact may justify a brief retelling. Put simply, Mary (traditionally a virgin) gave birth to Jesus in a stable and was subsequently visited by a variety of people, most notably three Kings, one of whom, Melchior, was a distant cousinby marriage of my wife, Lady Violet, whose ancestors were major landowners in Sinai. There is a family legend, quite possibly apocryphal, of a contemporary ledger of accounts that included the item: To hire of manger for newborn baby: 1 shekel. A small price for man’s salvation.
J.C.H. Mounsey (Anthony Powell)
It was a rummy sight, a bally great star throwing its rays on a stable where a lot of overexcited chappies were surging about, shepherds and whatnot and three exotic-looking coves dressed in the most extraordinary fashion, ornate doesn’t cover it. At the centre of all this ballyhoo sat a female with a bovine aspect cradling an infant, looking as all little brats do, like a frog with a hernia, but for some unfathomable reason the sheep botherers and Oriental gentlemen seemed bowled over by the little squirt, falling to their knees as though they’d been biffed on the back of the noggin with a boat hook by a psychotic aunt. Then the chappies with the sartorial issues, who obviously lacked the sound guidance of an infallible manservant, oiled away for a stiff bracer and to spread the jolly old tidings. Christ is born in Bethlehem, don’t you know.
Sue Pickard (P.G. Wodehouse)
No. 3432: Alternative facts
You are invited to submit a passage containing some AI-style ‘hallucinations’ (150 words/16 lines max). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by 7 January.
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