Christmas 2023

Seeking inspiration for a magazine article last month, I thought I might look up to find out of what 2024 is the International Year. After all, something like The Child, or The Oceans, or Faith, might make a good article for a church magazine. Then I discovered that the United Nations has decreed that 2024 is the International Year of Camelids.

Camelid is a biological family that covers alpacas, vicuñas, guanacos, llamas, and camels, both Bactrian and dromedary. While alpacas and vicuñas have a fairly good press, the others, at least in this country, have more of a reputation for spitting and smelling, and generally regarding humans as a bit beneath them. They are not thought of as beautiful, or indeed in much need of having an International Year all to themselves.

Why do they? Here’s what the U.N. says:

Camelids play an important role in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to the fight against hunger, the eradication of extreme poverty, the empowerment of women and the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems. From providing milk, meat and fibre for communities to transport for products and people, and organic fertilizer, camelids thrive where other livestock species cannot survive.

Camelids play a key role in the culture, economy, food security and livelihoods of communities in Andean highlands and in the arid and semi-arid lands in Africa and Asia, including Indigenous Peoples. Even in extreme climatic conditions they continue to produce fibre and nutritious food. Indeed, the International Year of Camelids presents a unique opportunity to raise awareness of the role of camelids in building resilience to climate change – particularly in mountains and arid and semi-arid lands.

The International Year of Camelids 2024 aims to build awareness of the untapped potential of camelids and to call for increased investment in the camelid sector, advocating for greater research, capacity development and the use of innovative practices and technologies. 

Camels edge their way into our Christmas story, or at least into Epiphany, by being associated with the Magi, the Three Wise Men or Kings coming from the East. The earliest image of the Magi is on a mid 3^rd century fresco in the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome, but the three shadowy figures are on foot, tiptoeing towards Mary and the baby as if afraid of waking Him. The earliest camels, lurking behind the Magi, appear the following century on a sarcophagus now held in the Vatican – in fact, all the images of the Magi in early times seem to be on funerary items, but then most Christian art was funerary at that time. Then camels fade out of fashion, and in the 12^th century St. Alban’s Psalter the Kings are shown on three fetching Arab steeds – blue, orange and pink. After all, European royalty did not ride on funny, lumpy beasts from the desert, even if elegant racing camels were all the rage amongst desert rulers.

The equine tradition carries on through the Renaissance, and may, indeed, be more accurate: an American priest and writer, Dwight Longenecker, asserts that though camels had long been domesticated and used as beasts of burden in Arabia, the development of those elegant Arab horses had led to them being used by more stylish riders by the time of Jesus’ birth. That, perhaps, begs the question – were the Magi really kings, or were they just poor academics on a long, slow and uncomfortable journey to sort out the matter of that star?

Perhaps it is to Victorian artists that we owe the modern idea of three richly-dressed and ethnically mixed monarchs on camelback. Orientalism maybe takes some of the blame, identifying the Magi as foreign, mysterious, skilled in the ways of astronomy, bearing exotic gifts, a nice contrast to those homely shepherds. The camels are all just part of the image, and part, now, of the stock iconography of Christmas as much as Santa and his reindeer.

T.S. Eliot’s poem, Journey of the Magi, gives us a wonderful first-person account of the difficulties of that long ride – nothing like that was undertaken lightly in those days, and yet they were driven on, despite discomforts, dangers, ‘the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, Lying down in melted snow’, driven to see what it was that star told them had happened. It was not enough for them to sit in their observatories, nodding wisely and making notes. They had to come, and to mark their visit with gifts whose meaning perhaps they did not even understand.

So whatever the wise men travelled in or on, whether you’re travelling or not this Christmas and New Year and Epiphany, whether you’re considering increasing your investment in the camelid sector (and I know I’d like a couple of alpacas in the garden), give a thought to the Magi, and their journey. Not just a silhouetted trek across a Christmas card’s starry sky, but an epic pilgrimage to the infant Christ.