Vicar's Message for Christmas
What's your favourite part of Christmas?
Hope
The days leading up to it; hearing snatches of a much-loved carol or Christmas hit on the radio and being suddenly transported back to a happy time, or younger days full of innocence and laughter?
Perhaps buying the Christmas tree, and the smell of pine?
Perhaps the shops as you step into them with their great bursts of colour, like spring, of reds and gold and greens?
Perhaps it's Christmas Eve and the utterly delightful toddlers' Nativity plays, or the warmth and comfortable feeling of sharing a carol or two in a church service, with lit candles, maybe; and the sense that something special is literally just around the corner?
Maybe you come to the extraordinarily intimate and profound late-night Christmas services in church? You've had a nice meal, perhaps been out to friends or the pub, then shrug into your coats and wander round to that place with the big spire and the candles and the men and women in flowing robes. To listen to the Christmas story one more time - possibly it reveals something to you that you had never thought of before? And, of course, there's the Carols; the wonderful, traditional, meaningful hymns of hope and love and joy.
Love
Maybe for some, of course, Christmas does not hold such things. Perhaps it means another special day spent with no-one around, or spent with strangers. Christmas then is a time of feeling most alone. But, we need to remember, that no-one need be alone at Christmas, because, for others, Christmas means popping round and saying hello to family, friends and neighbours. For others it can mean taking time out to be with the elderly, the isolated, the infirm. One only has to ask. You see, for many, Christmas day is filled with a special kind of love. A love found in going to visit someone or even to help prepare and serve Christmas lunch for others.
Joy
Then, on The day, The Big Day, The Special Day, there are the church services and the Christmas films and shows on TV, or a sumptuous Christmas concert on the radio.
And, of course, there are the presents: the joy and the excitement of tearing off the wrapping paper. And there's the laughter when someone didn't get quite the right gift for someone else...
Not to mention the Christmas meal - seven times more than we would normally eat. And after? The fun and frivolity of that special day of people in paper hats hunched around those brightly-coloured board games.
So... what is your favourite part of Christmas?
Mine is knowing that all this was started, had its basis in a mystery. The mystery of God coming to share our lives in the form of a little child, and bringing with him all that Hope, and Love, and Joy.
If you get the chance to pop in to St Mary's for one of our services, it will be lovely to see you. You can be sure of a warm welcome. In the meantime, all of us at St Mary's wish you a peaceful and happy Christmas and a blessed New Year.
God bless
Martin