Christmas cheer

Are you ready for Christmas? If you have time to read this, I expect that you are (or that Christmas doesn’t figure large in your life). Don’t you think, though, that being ready for Christmas is not only about ticking chores off lists, but also a matter of the heart? I am never ‘ready’ in the sense of having done everything I meant to do before the festivities. Yet in the last couple of days, I have at last found myself ready to welcome Christmas.

At its heart is the mystery, the beauty and the challenge of the child in the manger. How that story has become tangled up in holly and  Christmas trees and snow and Santa Claus is beyond me, but I love all these trappings of Christmas-tide too. We have been busy:

gathering holly and fir branches to deck the halls,

opening Advent calendars (I hope that I am never to old to enjoy opening these little doors),

doing some festive cooking (there’s nothing like the scent of warm cloves and cinnamon to cheer a winter’s day),

singing carols (from a very Sixties carol book, complete with pictures of Sputnik) around the piano, with the dog joining in as often as not,

'The Golden Book of Carols', 1967

decorating the Christmas tree,

and – in a complete reversal of last year’s weather – longing for more snow.

And now the day is upon us. We are meeting up with friends and family and sharing some good fellowship, which perhaps is the essence of the season. However you spend yours, may I thank you for visiting Dancing Beastie this year and wish you a very Merry Christmas.

A Christmas card by our younger son