A Unique Christmas - We Hope! And a suggestion - by Trevor Thorn

Our Christmas tree with 74 angels

 - but only us to reflect on them.

Other than for those among us with a desire to be a hermit, I imagine most of us will be feeling sad that we were not able to be with those we love and care for during this year's celebration of Christ’s birth. 

I imagine, too, that most of us will be hoping Christmas 2021 will be a reversion to our ‘normal’ celebratory mode - although changes during the twelve months until 25.12.2021 will almost inevitably mean next years commemoration will not be a mere postponement of this year’s plans.

So while everything is fresh in mind, with every missed hug, every diminished gathering, every unexpected solitude, it might be  good if anyone who delights in writing in any genre, recorded our feelings about this festival time that we hope will prove unique. It might also be good discipline to limit our accounts to a single side of A4 - and someone just might like to take on gathering these stories together. (I can’t do that because the preparation for regular ‘Zoom’ services is taking a large part of the six days between one Sunday and the next (and proving very tiring).

I was, just in the past few days, quite rightly, challenged to identify the purpose of a post I put up on the ACW site: so I think these would be my purposes for taking up this suggestion. Perhaps one of the challenges of such an exercise would be to define your own purposes - or to adopt this five-fold list, if that feels a good starting place for you.

• To have a record of this very strange Christmas to show younger people if they ask in 5/ 10/ 15 years time
• To help us identify the prime aspects of this strangeness as it affected us
• To be part of an archival story-based exercise built around the strangest celebration in modern times of the coming of the Messiah. This is, after all is history in the making.
• To be able to remind ourselves in future years how this time felt
• To identify where we might have found hope in this extraordinary time.

I’d like to have followed this with my impressions as a sample - but I realise I need to think it through quite carefully, so as not to become too garrulous. Maybe next month...