Christmas is round the corner, and you’ve probably heard someone saying “Jesus is the reason for the season”. But you might never have thought to wonder “Which department in Heaven is the most Christmassy?” Gabriel’s department, of course.

Why Gabriel’s department? You see, the Christmas stories mention him by name. How could he not be happy with that?

Were you to come up here in October (and I don’t recommend it…) and visit his floor, you’d find tinsel on the door frame, a Christmas tree in the corner, a life sized manger with pet reindeer grazing, and Gabriel himself in his office wearing a big red Christmas hat. Carols would be playing, bells would be ringing, and the central table would contain a bowl of steaming punch and a plate of mince pies on the central table.

Most of us realise there are other important human festivals, but to Gabriel Christmas is the only one that should matter. Halloween, for example, just means dressing up in costumes that aren’t Christmas costumes, and eating foods that aren’t Christmas foods.

Thanksgiving is even worse. Takes the focus right off Christmas preparations, he says. I’ve heard him railing against families that met up for Thanksgiving and not Christmas. Unnatural, he called it. Spurning the gift of Heaven, and ignoring the dignity of Heaven’s favourite archangel.

One more example: Some of us were talking about setting up a Melbourne Cup watch party. Surely there could be nothing to object to about that? He just pointed significantly at the nativity scene in the corner and said “We used donkeys in my day”. It was left to Raphael to host the watch party.

So that’s October and November taken care of. Come December, and it escalates significantly. Sometimes he’ll be wearing a Christmas tie and one of his hideous Christmas jumpers. Other times he’ll have antlers on, perhaps with a red nose for good effect (not always from Christmas cheer, either…).

Never try and get a decision out of Gabriel in December. His main occupation then is trying to see how different Christmas services he can have streamed into his office live, and which ones mention him by name. With humanity as numerous and as spread out as it is, that’s a 24/7 occupation.

It’s perhaps at its worst at meetings of the Executive Council. In case you don’t know, that’s Gabriel, Uriel, Michael and Raphael, with Jesus himself chairing. Each of them think of themselves as God’s favourite archangel heading the most important department in Heaven, so the meetings can be a bit tense at the best of times. But in December it goes to a whole new level. Jesus tries to play the peacemaker sometimes, but between you and me he’s not very good at it.

Usually what happens is that Gabriel suggests some horribly impractical way of marking Christmas. When one of the others objects, he just gestures to his Christmas hat and says “Were you there?”

I heard one time Jesus said hesitantly “I was there, you know, Gabriel. And my Dad always told me it was meant to be about me”. Boss’s son or no boss’s son, you didn’t think Gabriel was going to let him steal his thunder, did you? Quick as a whip came the reply “Yeah, but you were a baby then - it’s not like you’d remember anything about it”. You may well say “Jesus wept”!

The thing you’ve got to remember about Gabriel is that you can never tell who will get his attention or what words will stick. I think it was sometime during the Roaring Twenties that a junior angel told him “all publicity is good publicity”, and he’s never forgotten it. Santa, reindeer, sleighs, chimneys, elves, snowmen, the North Pole - to him, they’re all just part of keeping Christmas relevant to the modern world. All publicity is good publicity, mate!

Take the idea of Christmas in July parties, for example. Have you ever heard Gabriel mentioned at one of those? He’s convinced that it’s just a matter of time before it starts, then soon enough he’ll be being mentioned year round in the same breath as Jesus.

Then there’s Elf on the Shelf. Gabriel decided something new was needed to get kids interested in Christmas, and mangers and old-fashioned Advent calendars just weren’t going to cut it. Surprisingly enough, that one was actually approved by Michael and Raphael. I think they saw the obvious surveillance benefits. Or maybe they just wanted to humiliate Gabriel if it didn’t work out. It’s hard to tell, sometimes.

When it comes to carols, obviously this one’s his favourite:

He’s always moaning about how no-one can recognise a good carol when they hear one.

But there’s a lot of Jingle Bells playing, too, and no devotee of Elf on the Shelf could be without Santa Claus is coming to town. I’ve even heard him listening to White Wine in the Sun, though he shuts it off pretty quickly when he realises he’s not alone.

So why has the nameless “Herald Angel” got a real ear-worm of a carol while most people don’t even know Gabriel has a carol? It’s a bigger problem than it looks: Gabriel didn’t get any of the glamorous Christmas roles. Yes, he was the only one mentioned by name, but the story can easily be told without even mentioning him.

Think about it: Shepherds in the field hearing about a special new baby?
That’s not Gabriel.

Wise men with their camels and their gifts following a star? Appearances to Mary and Joseph, and a desperate flight to Egypt?
No Gabriel there.

Angel striking an old man speechless, then telling a young woman she would have an unexpected son? That’s Gabriel, all right. Appearing to vulnerable mortals alone, and then trying to dominate them. Hardly stirring stuff.

I think that’s part of why he’s so happy to promote all the non-Incarnation parts of Christmas. Yes, it keeps up his reputation as Mr Christmas and keeps his name alive - but it also means no-one needs to ask too many awkward questions about who those other angels were.

Not that the strategy’s worked. It’s an open secret here that the angel who appeared to the shepherds was poor old Jebadiah, Raphael’s favourite. Like Gabriel, he was rising through the ranks and should probably have made archangel, but Gabriel was always better at deal making. No sooner had Gabriel come to power than Jebadiah was back to the mail room. He’s been there for the last 500 years, and it doesn’t seem likely he’ll move up while Gabriel’s around.

It’s sad, really: In spite of all his success, inside, he’s still the junior messenger boy who wasn’t trusted with the really important messages. Gabriel’s Christmas parties may be famous for their steaming bowls of punch, which he insists on mixing himself (I think it’s the only reason Michael even comes). But switch off the Christmas lights, wave goodbye to the guests, and you’ll see a very different Gabriel. Every year he’ll take another few glasses, and in no time he’ll be weeping about how no-one truly appreciates him.

I’m sure you’ve heard the Christmas texts before, but to properly understand them you need to step back a couple of thousand years and forget the grand, self-important Mr Christmas of today.

Gabriel had been stuck in the mail room since before creation. I suspect he’d have thrown in his lot with Lucifer then, if given half a chance, but Lucifer didn’t even notice him. Nor did Michael, really, but he at least chose him for his army.

It was through Michael that he got the gig, really. There were far more senior angels available to take a message of that level. But Michael had been impressed by his work with Daniel a couple of centuries before, as well as a few other more recent commissions, and back then Michael had God’s ear.

I’ll give Gabriel this: He’s good at climbing the greasy pole. He recognised early on how important the commission could be. And he also knew the importance of having his name recorded against the job - mentioned in dispatches, as it were. As far as he was concerned, he’d been a junior angel for far too long, and this might be his big break.

Read again that message to Zechariah, and you can see all this. He’d stood tall, delivered the message exactly as given to him, and impressed Zechariah doing it. All he needed to do was to slip his name into the record and everything would be perfect.

Then Zechariah asked his question, and you can just see the ground being cut out from under Gabriel. Yes, he got his name out, but all that stuff about standing in the presence of God was just bravado. He’d literally been in God’s presence for the first time that morning. Zechariah had spoiled Gabriel’s big chance, and so there was nothing left but to lash out.

Did you know he was investigated for excessive use of power? After all, Zechariah and Elizabeth had been chosen as John’s parents because they were followers of God. And many thought Zechariah’s question had been perfectly reasonable.

“What message does it send if we punish the righteous with the wicked?”, they said. Uriel’s always been strong on that kind of thing (particularly if he can embarrass Michael while doing it).

The end result was a foregone conclusion, really. God’s mantra is “What’s the good of having all this power if you can’t use it?” But there was more to it than that: Gabriel was God’s chosen envoy, so there couldn’t be any question of him having chosen wrongly. He even gave Gabriel the next important mission to prove he had the divine confidence.

But I understand behind closed doors it was a very different story. Michael was on the carpet for daring to recommend such an incompetent messenger.

Yes, God gave Gabriel his next mission, but he was very firm about how it must be executed: I don’t care how many questions Mary asks you. You do not take away her hearing. You do not take away her sight. You do not touch her in any way. She’s mine. You put one foot out of line, and you’ll never return to Heaven. And it’s not like Lucifer will take someone who boasts about “standing in the presence of God”.

All things considered, Gabriel did that job well enough. That would have been the time to fade back into (relative) obscurity, lick his wounds, and play the long game. Really, he should have been thanking his lucky stars that he got another chance.

But no, he had to petition God himself to be the one appearing to the shepherds. He was lucky that, with the Great Plan advancing and all, God was in a good mood that day, so he got the polite brush offs first:
“I have every confidence in my servant Jebadiah”
“You’ve done well on solo missions, but I don’t think you’re ready to be conducting choirs of angels quite yet. Come back another century”.

But he’s never known when to leave well enough alone, and kept pushing till God exploded: “Do you think you’re the only angel in heaven? Do you think I’d trust you again after the mess you made of that simple mission to Zechariah? Get the fuck out of my office, or I’ll banish you to Tartarus”.

He’s never forgotten it. It may not have stopped his eventual rise to archangel, but those encounters changed him. He keeps obsessively pushing his one claim to fame, and it keeps alienating the people he needs to support him.

Truth be told, he cuts a ridiculous figure in his Christmas hat. There are constant whispers behind his back:
“Here comes Mr Christmas! Ho, ho, ho!”
“Just what is he wearing?”
“He’s supposed to be archangel, for God’s sake, not Assistant Cheerleader for Christmas Affairs!”

You have to understand that we’re a bit stretched here. As the mortal population grew, call centre wait times sky-rocketed, so Heaven’s been constantly expanding for more than a century. There are already five unfilled vacancies for archangel, and no amount of whispering among the ranks is going to make that six.

But the Executive Council is a different matter. If there’s one thing that unites the rest of the Executive Council, it’s that they should never have made Gabriel archangel. Everyone knows he’s one more unplanned pandemic away from an ignominious dismissal.

So there it is, mortal. Perhaps you thought Christmas was really a pagan festival co-opted by Christianity, or perhaps you thought Jesus was the reason for the season. But it’s really Gabriel who’s the reason for the season - and he won’t let any of us up here forget it. Send help!

You’ve probably got one more question: What’s my part in it?

I’m the one who keeps the department running each December while Gabriel’s off watching Christmas services. I’ve seen the drunkenness and the insecurities too many times to count. I might even feel sorry for him - if it didn’t affect me so much.

I’d say it was nothing personal, but it is. I’ve been overlooked too many times, and Gabriel will never give me the credit due for saving his fat ass time after time. None of this is fair: I strengthened Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane for his supreme ordeal without so much as a mention by name, while Gabriel gets all the credit for peripheral jobs everyone knows he fucked up. Yes, I want to make archangel, same as everyone does, but it would give me particular pleasure to take over from that pompous buffoon.

You know what I went to his Christmas party as this year? The Grinch! He was delighted - at least someone’s getting into the mood, he said. But one day he’ll see the real message - I’d steal his Christmas like a shot, no questions asked.

The party ended with him weeping into the punch bowl, same as every year. Typical! I’ll give him something to cry about. Michael’s promised me if I can find something for him to act on, I can do the casting down personally. You can bet I’ll be wearing my best Krampus outfit then. I’ll march into his office, strip that ridiculous Santa outfit off him, then shove those antlers of his where the sun doesn’t shine.

I happen to know that Lucifer and Michael have been negotiating the best way to punish him after he’s been cast down. Wait till he sees that hellfire is really burning Christmas trees, and his only food is toasted reindeer!

But it’s not enough, really. If it were left up to me, I’d have him in an endless chimney, fire below, snow above, with the world’s heaviest sack on his back. His Christmas hat would be an unquenchable fire, and his hands too occupied to remove it, no matter how hard he tries. All Sisyphus’s troubles will be as nothing compared to what I’d like to do to him.

It looks like he’ll get through this Christmas season unscathed, but perhaps next year will do. I’m an angel of modest needs and simple wants: All I want for Christmas is my boss’s front teeth, preferably served on a platter with a sprig of holly.

Perhaps his downfall will be next year, perhaps it will be in a hundred years time, but when it comes, it will come swiftly. And you mortals will probably keep on with your stupid Santas and Christmas hats and reindeer and elves on shelves as if nothing happened.

Still, you heard it here first. The name’s Johann. Remember the name.

One day I’ll be the greatest archangel, and even Jesus will have to acknowledge he couldn’t have done it without me. Couldn’t do it without me. Michael, Uriel, Lucifer himself - none of them will be able to stop me. The stars will align anew, Santa’s precious North Pole will melt, and the Easter Bunny will once more take her rightful place as the greatest festival queen of heaven.

I, Johann Septimus Wonka, have spoken!

Author’s Note

This story originally spun out of a Christmas Carol fan-fic I was writing. But it also came out of thinking about the True Meaning of Christmas: Far too many column inches are shed on trying to prove Christmas is an exclusively Christian festival, or that it’s of obvious pagan origin. I just don’t care any more. I wanted something that would make me laugh, and what could be better than an angel who actually promoted all that non-Christian Christmas stuff?

So it was originally a light-hearted, throw-away piece, but the more I tried to finish it, the longer and darker it got. I wondered why an angel who had so much dirt to dish on Gabriel was still friends with him. And I slowly realised that he wasn’t.

I think it’s also obvious that, even though I didn’t start with the Gabriel from the Good Omens TV series, the series did influence me. My Gabriel probably isn’t Jon Hamm, but if you want a nice mental image, try this:
Jon Hamm in a Christmas hat with Christmas jumper and tie, sitting behind a desk captioned “Christmas is the reason for the Season, because I’m the Archangel fucking Gabriel”.

Merry Christmas, fellow mortals! May the stars shine on you, and no shadow of Heaven or Hell spoil this very human festival before us.

– Johannus Morganicus, Master of the Revels