WHEN I ask myself how, as a child, I practised faith at home, it’s the seasonal resources that I remember first — perhaps because so many of them appeared at the table in our 1980s, primary-coloured kitchen.
We brought home from church packs with activities, prayers, and graces to be used for each occasion, but it’s the tangible items that stick in the mind: the gradual lighting of the candles on the Advent wreath, or learning to blow the contents of an egg out through a needle-hole, so that we could paint the fragile shell for the Easter tree. (Our mother kept all of our attempts, from the toddler fingerprints to the Latin and Greek inscriptions that my sister and I produced as university students, and they still appear on the tree every year.)
Of all seasonal resources, the most evocative is the nativity set. We set it up as an empty stable at the beginning of Advent: Mary, Joseph, and the donkey began their journey at the other end of the house, moving daily towards their destination. The magic and wonder of coming down on Christmas morning to find that Jesus had appeared in the manger (quietly slipped in after the midnight service) rivalled the joy of the bulging stockings, and is still a special and holy moment for me, even though I am now the one who puts him there.
In repeating the experience with my own children, I used our elaborate Playmobil nativity that I couldn’t resist adding to every year (we now have eight wise men); and, for her baptism, my daughter was given a beautiful nativity set with the figures already hidden away in 24 drawers so that they could be gradually added through the season — with Jesus, of course, in drawer 24.
FOR my own baptism, a godmother gave me a silver candlestick to hold the baptismal candle, and this became an essential part of an annual observance: to light the candle on the anniversary of my baptism. In childhood, I remember its being lit during the family meal, and feeling proud to have it by my place setting.
These days I have made a little personal liturgy around it. The anniversary of my baptism falls on 31 October, but we used to celebrate it on 1 November because, my mother insisted, it was liturgical All Saints’ Day, having taken place on a Sunday.
With apologies to my mother, I now light the candle on the evening of the 31st, because there is something vastly appropriate about the little flame standing out against the background of Hallowe’en; and I read the words from the baptism service about fighting valiantly against sin, the world, and the devil, and shining as a light in the world.
I don’t know how many years it took for the original candle to burn down, but the silver candlestick provides the link back to my baptism, and the year when, being unable to remember where I had put it, I had to use a substitute was just not quite the same.
GODPARENTS were an extension of the immediate family for us, which is why I was approaching my teens before I had properly worked out exactly how many of my uncles and aunts were actually blood relations. In my bedroom, I had a photo frame — one of those with many different windows — from which the faces of grandparents and godparents, aunts and uncles, looked cheerfully down on me. I learned to include them in my bedtime prayers, saying “God bless . . .” and naming them as I looked at each picture.
I made sure to do the same for my daughter when she was born, printing a huge poster of faces to put above her bed; for her, it became even more important, as she is autistic and needs a visual reminder of people she doesn’t see daily. Her relationship with her godmothers is very special. The pictures serve as a good reminder for us, too, that we have grown our family by three extra adults per child, and ought to make an effort to stay in touch with the ones who now live further away.
WHEN I came to write my own trilogy of children’s books, I thought back over all the books that had most influenced me. Of course, Narnia featured prominently and fed my budding love of allegory, metaphor, and fantasy; but if I had to choose one set of books for the growth of faith, it would be Janet and John Perkins’s Haffertee Hamster series. There is something about the ordinariness of the Diamond family (talking soft-toy hamster aside), and the way in which they include their Christianity in day-to-day experiences, which was irresistible to six-year-old me; and that still, for me, holds the key to faith in children’s books: it’s the power of recognising in fiction a family like your own.
Some of Shirley Hughes’s books held the same experience: Lucy and Tom go to church on Christmas morning and don’t open their gifts until the afternoon, and I didn’t know any other children who did that. Finding yourself represented in a book is a foundational experience for a child — and, of course, the same is true when it comes to representing other faiths and other experiences; but ordinary, lived Christianity is rare in children’s books.
With my own children, I discovered the wonderful Custard Cream Communion Club series by Ruth Whiter, which, sadly, is now quite difficult to track down, but held the same quotidian magic. Books by the prolific Eleanor Watkins, such as the Beech Bank Girls series, follow a similar pattern for slightly older children; and, when I wrote the Gladstone the Gargoyle trilogy, I used the same recipe of an adventure within the ordinariness of biscuits, school, wellies, family, and kitchen tables. Faith thrives within the stuff of life.
Amy Scott Robinson is a writer, performance storyteller, and ventriloquist. Her books include the Gladstone Tales, published by Kevin Mayhew.
