I just plain love Christmas. I know I’m professionally supposed to. But I loved Christmas when I worked in Retail – except for that traumatic day, working in Nurdin and Peacock Cash and Carry in Luton, that I heard Chris de Burgh’s “Spaceman Came Travelling” played nine times. I loved the planning, the expectation, the warehouses pushing mince pies out to the stores in August, the fear that the website might break this year, the day I worked in John Lewis in Oxford Street and we took a million quid in one day. This was in 1987, when a million quid was actually quite a lot.
Even noted atheist Richard Dawkins likes Christmas Carols. But even so, you’d think, when my Christmas Carol season starts in the first week of December, and goes on till Epiphany, that I might get a bit sick of them. Unlike Doctor Dawkins, I have to sing them on a semi-professional basis. But I don’t. I may look a bit frayed by 12 noon on Christmas Day, but that’s because I’ve been to five services in 24 hours, and roughly 60 Christmas events in 25 days.
I love Christmas because it says, in the dark of a northern European winter, that darkness does not win. We light up our houses, streets, and churches, and defy the claims of nature around us that all things come to an end. We know that, even as the ground freezes hard, crocus bulbs are starting to nudge towards a sun they currently can’t even detect. That spring will come – and that the lambs that will be born then are already in their mothers’ wombs.
It can seem like a dark old world sometimes – the last four years have given us enough sadness, given the people of Ukraine and the Middle East enough grieving. But the “light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it.”
If you believe these things, may you know Christ our Light, shining in our world and in our hearts, this Christmas. And if you don’t, then have a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year. As the old song says (and you’ll hear it soon enough) may your days be merry and bright.
Revd Gary Alderson
