Looking back to my early childhood, I can remember going to bed on Christmas Eve and when we woke on Christmas morning, the front room of our house was decorated with a small Christmas Tree, a few baubles, some fairy lights and a couple of lengths of tinsel. We also had a paper streamer that ran across the top of the chimney breast and as far as I can remember, that was it. As I grew older, decorating the house became more of a family task and during the week leading up to Christmas we would hang the same baubles on the tree with the same fairy lights, which would never light first time and always involved fiddling with individual bulbs until they sprung into action, before they were carefully hung on the tree, camouflaging the cable with the somewhat dated lengths of tinsel. We would make paper chains out of strips of coloured paper and fold crepe paper together to make streamers.
We decided to have a real Christmas tree for the first Christmas after we had got married and ordered the cheapest tree with roots we could from our local green grocers. Picking it up just before Christmas 1985, it looked puny as it sat in the corner of our lounge and would have been swamped by our newly purchased decorations, so we went to the local garden centre and bought a six foot tree, which looked much better. Having already decided to invest our hard earned money in the little tree with roots, we dug a hole in the front garden and planted it. We donated our Christmas tree in our front garden to our Church in Bradford, the Christmas after we moved to East Anglia, by which point, it had grown to at least fifteen feet high and looked spledid. Patience in this case was definitely a virtue!
Our first daughter Laura was born on Thursday 10th December 1987, there were complications with her birth and we were told from the outset that the best we could hope for was a severely handicapped child, sadly Laura only lived for sixteen hours and died on Friday 11th December. We didn’t put any decorations that year, we didn’t feel like celebrating, what should have been our happiest Christmas ever, turned out to be our sadest. We decided that we wanted to mark Laura’s first birthday, so on her birthday in 1988 we put up our Christmas decorations on that day. Advent felt so very different a year on, because we were expecting our second daughter Amy early in 1989, so as we made a bigger splash than ever and it has become the custom in our family to decorate our home on December 10th as we mark our little girl’s birthday.
It has become a custom for people to spend fortunes decking their homes with lights and I think “why not?” Christmas isn’t an easy time for everybody and particularly at the moment in the aftermath of the Pandemic, over a hundred and forty thousand families will be remembering loved ones during advent. As Christians we often use the term that the light of Christ came into a darkened world and I pray that this year as people feel the darkness closing in around them, our Christmas lights might bring some joy into their hearts.
A prayer for this week: Find a few moments to stop, be quiet and think for a moment or two.
God of love, open my heart and my mind to the story I am about to live through, help me not simply to saunter through another year, but make it matter for me, help me to explore the meaning of each milestone as I pass it and make me ready to adjust my thinking and my actions, in the light of the new discoveries I make. Amen