BBC/YouTube

At 3pm UK time on Christmas day, the Queen’s Christmas message is broadcast throughout the Commonwealth. Annually the format is basically the identical, with the Queen giving her personal account of the primary private, nationwide and worldwide occasions of the 12 months and reflecting on the which means of Christmas. As such, it has turn out to be an necessary a part of the festivities for a lot of households within the UK and past.

With the COVID-19 pandemic nonetheless raging, contemporary restrictions imposed and Brexit quickly approaching, this 12 months’s broadcast has taken on new significance as a supply of stability and luxury, a continuing in these tough and unsure instances. Subsequently, it’s value inspecting how the language used within the broadcast creates this sense of reassurance.

Since 1952, the Queen’s Christmas message has carried out three ideological capabilities by way of rhetorical appeals based mostly on religion and household.

Identification

The Queen shares private anecdotes, which she typically hyperlinks to bizarre folks’s experiences by way of the pronouns “we” and “us”.

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On Christmas Day 1964, as an illustration, she instructed viewers that: “All of us who’ve been blessed with younger households know from lengthy expertise that when one’s home is at its noisiest, there may be typically much less trigger for anxiousness”. As most new dad and mom would recognise this truism, it conveys the message that – on this respect at the least – the royals are like every other household.

The primary televised Royal Christmas message, 1957.

The Royal Household/YouTube

The Queen can be conscious that some households can be separated in the course of the festive season and commonly expresses empathy for them. As she stated in 1956: “I wish to ship a particular message of hope and encouragement to all who […] can’t be with these they love right now: to the sick who can’t be at dwelling”.

This message is made extra poignant due to COVID-19, because the Queen recognised in her particular tackle on April 5 2020. Certainly, it’s virtually inevitable that this 12 months’s Christmas broadcast will embody related phrases of comfort for individuals who have been separated from their family members in the course of the pandemic.

Continuity

Uncertainty is one other recurring theme within the Queen’s Christmas broadcast, as she tries to make sense of the 12 months’s occasions for the advantage of her viewers. She offers her private responses to nationwide and world issues, which ceaselessly contain the enactment of supposedly timeless (however predominantly Christian) values. On Christmas Day 1980, amid points such because the Soviet-Afghanistan struggle and UK unemployment, she stated:

We all know that the world can by no means be free from battle and ache, however Christmas additionally attracts our consideration to all that’s hopeful and good on this altering world; it speaks of values and qualities which can be true and everlasting and it reminds us that the world we wish to see can solely come from the goodness of the center.

Amongst these values are religion, charity and compassion and, by praising them as a supply of stability and the means for creating a greater world, the Queen is probably looking for to strengthen adherence to them. Not solely that, her appeals to Christian values and her emphasis on the household present a way of safety for individuals who are disoriented by the speedy tempo of social change. In flip, this sustains the monarchy by establishing the Queen as “a everlasting anchor, bracing in opposition to the storms and grounding us in certainty”, as former British prime minister David Cameron stated in 2012, marking her Diamond Jubilee.

Unity

The Queen’s rhetoric of unity relies totally on the metaphor of the Commonwealth as a household, which recurs all through the Christmas broadcasts. In 1956, as an illustration, she noticed that:

We discuss of ourselves as a “household of countries”, and maybe our relationships with each other are usually not so very totally different from these which exist between members of any household. Everyone knows that these are usually not at all times simple, for there isn’t any legislation inside a household which binds its members to suppose, or act, or be alike.

Regardless of these variations, in 2011 the Queen described the Commonwealth as “a household of 53 nations, all with a typical bond, shared beliefs, mutual values and targets”. As the top of the Commonwealth, it’s maybe no exaggeration to say that the Queen is the matriarch of this household of countries, whose main position is to maintain the unit collectively and uphold its values. Certainly, the Christmas broadcast has been an necessary supply of sentimental energy for the reason that finish of Empire. As Sonny Ramphal, a former Commonwealth secretary basic, put it: “with out her presence, the Commonwealth will really feel it’s lacking the captain from the bridge”.

With the UK authorities having tightened Christmas COVID-19 restrictions, in addition to the introduction of bans on UK journey in quite a few nations, this festive season can be very totally different. Maybe greater than ever, as households face separation or the disruption of their conventional plans, folks will search solace within the ritual of the Queen’s Christmas broadcast.

This text relies on the challenge 'Envisioning Britain and Britishness: The Queen's Christmas Message', which is supported by a Leverhulme Belief Analysis Fellowship (award quantity: RF-2019-5317).