On Monday, to the general amazement of all, my assembly at the Infants School had a Christmas theme. I talked about Christmas trees and what you might find on top of them. Remarkably none of the children offered 'a fairy': usually someone does.'Who comes to visit the shepherds in the story?' I asked, only to have a voice shout out from the left among the Reception children 'An alien!' I blinked a bit, ignored that and picked someone else who gave the correct or at least expected response of a corporeal but non-physical intelligence whose existence is devoted to glorifying and communicating the will of God, i.e. an angel.
This morning I discovered that one of the other local schools is doing a nativity play in which aliens in a broken-down spaceship do indeed visit Bethlehem, so the intervention on Monday is probably explained by an elder sibling who is involved in that production. Shame really, a spontaneous reimagining of the Christmas story along extraterrestrial lines would be so much more impressive.
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