That's the forty-first Christingle done then.
On top of nineteen nativities. And the four residential home carol services and the carol-singing round the village (and other people's villages). Eaten the Druids' team Xmas dinner. And the Beaker Bazaar has flogged off all the bling at half-price. And got the Creme Eggs on the shelf
Went into the Moot House last night and someone has put holly around the window ledges. I had it removed of course. How are we going to celebrate Christmas properly when it comes, if we don't respect Advent?
In my nursing days we used to do our best to celebrate Christmas for the patients - although, by then, the only people left in hospital were those too ill to go home, as managers swooped through hastily emptied wards, turning off lights and saving on unsocial-hours payments.
ReplyDeleteWe did our best, but I still had the uneasy feeling that there was something slightly macabre about drip-stands and ventilators twined with tinsel. And I remember the ghoulish plastic surgeon who turned up to carve the ward turkey brandishing a microtome (knife used to slice extremely this slices of skin for grafting).
Eileen will remember the tradition in Oxford, although it might not have been called Oxmas at the time, of disposing of the celebrations in the middle of the eighth week of term, before the rabble Go Down, leaving one almost the whole of Advent to prepare for Christmas. Only when Christmas Day falls at the wrong end of the week is Oxmas entirely in November.
ReplyDeleteI've always thought that limiting advent to the end of Nov and the whole of December is a mistake. The whole year should be spent in reflective waiting for the Birth of Baby Jesus, because that is conceptually, the foundation of our faith, along with the Cross.
ReplyDeleteIf we could return to the Book of Common Prayer, using the weekly readings and lectionery, we'd have a much sturdier faith, built on Elizabethan(1st) values, not the modern mish mash of faith, built on Post-Modern stuff.
And we need to ban liberation theology completely, because it's Post-Modern world view, distorts the status quo and threatens the security of the Empire.
It is 1913 isn't it - at least my edition of the Church Times says so?