Many of us find ourselves with mixed feelings about Christmas.
On the one hand, it should be a time for unstinted celebrations, as we remember how God broke in to our history of time and space, with the beginning of the fulfilment of his great eternal plan for the salvation of the world. Unto us is born a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord! Yet on the other hand, the annual celebrations of Mammon, which began way back in early October, reach their manic climax, in an avalanche of must-haves, must-dos and must-gives, which leave us on the wrong foot. We don’t want to be Scrooges, negative and ungenerous; we don’t want to withdraw into a holier-than-thou piety; but we don’t want to be drowned in the tidal wave of the winterval festival which is Xmas.
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By way of solution, everything will depend on our personal relationship with the Lord. We tend to judge our devotion to Christ, even the state of our relationship with him, by our own subjective feelings. There is sentimentality about the popular concept of Christmas, which centres on the sweet, defenceless baby for whom there was no room at the inn. And we can want to feel a warm glow in our hearts, as we bring our gifts to offer to the Christ-child. But it’s hard to feel like that on Christmas Eve when ‘Once in Royal’ is sounding out from the King’s College carols and you are stuffing the turkey, or baking yet another batch of mince pies, or struggling through the traffic.
