A different kind of Christmas

Assembly ...
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

A rather different Christmas, that was - but captured in one of its best moments by the pic accompanying this post, which shows Mr B putting the final touches to a very pink doll's cradle, the recipient of which waits eagerly, doll at the ready. And for me this was always going to be the biggest difference: my first Christmas Day away from home since the year before the daddy of the cradle recipient was born. So farewell, Domestic Goddess, and welcome, leisured guest who spent a great deal of time playing with toys or spread somnolently on the sofa. And d'you know something? It was great.

But there are other memories. The triumphant sense of having helped to make the midnight mass happen, and the joy of singing with a skilled group before and during it, making up in some ways for the cancelled carol service. "Bethlehem Down" is quite tricky by candlelight - even if you do cheat with tiny LED lights. The huge delight of seeing both my grandchildren - to say nothing of their parents - together on Boxing Day, and managing to get photos of them sitting like angels before we ate (again). The relief of journeys safely completed and of knowing the London contingent made it home in one piece.

And there were other firsts. I can't recall when the weather was quite so adverse at this time of the year, making motorway driving as slow as single track road traffic and outings to Asda as perilous as the Rock Fall on Everest. (note hyperbole here). And I haven't spent time in hospital on Christmas Day before, and have nothing but praise for the people who chose to work in Edinburgh Royal on that day and exuded reassurance, pain relief and the exhortation to have some turkey and that glass of Rioja when I got back to the house. (I recovered. I slept a lot)

And where did the message of Christmas come in? I suspect in that last paragraph, actually, for the people who don't focus entirely on church and home but make it possible for others to do so are cheery treasures. As I get older, I realise the futility of trying to hold onto the thrill I felt as a child, the wonder I found as a student in the singing of carols I'd only heard on the radio and could now perform well, the excitement of your own family Christmas as stockings were filled and hung and presents piled beneath the tree. This year we opened our own presents at 2am over a glass of malt, and the rest as part of the excitement of another generation. And that's as it should be. I'm not going to manufacture something that's passing.

Instead, I'm going to enjoy the image created by Fr. Hugh in his midnight sermon, of the Christ Child elbowing aside the ox and the ass of greed and selfishness - an image which had me chuckling at the thought of an infant as muscular and determined as my grandson Alan. It's an image which doesn't depend on ritual or appropriate footwear and which I can carry with me into any future Christmas season. It also gives a better meaning to the platitudinous "Christmas is for children" - for in a sense it is, and for the child in all of us.

So Happy Christmas, children, whatever your age!

Great expectations

Presumably our expectations about life these days give rise to all the panic we see about ...well, snow. I have childhood memories of huge snowbanks at the sides of Glasgow streets, and of being sent home early because the (outside) school toilets were frozen; of wonderful sledging on these unexpected free afternoons because of aforementioned plumbing crises; of launching myself intrepidly down slides in the playground before the janny ruined them with salt. But I don't recall the trams going off, or being kept at home because it was too snowy to travel to school (half an hour away, if you walked).

But now we expect to be cocooned in our cars until the last possible moment when we go anywhere; we expect to whizz along motorways at insane speeds; we expect planes to shake off the shackles of earth without worrying about the improbability of landing safely on black ice - and when something makes this difficult or impossible we go into hyperbolic mode and talk as if the end of the world had come.

I'm as bad, in my own way: if I want to speak to someone and they're not either at home to answer the phone or responding immediately to their mobile, I feel irritation closely followed - if it's family - by panic: is their phone ringing out in a crashed car? Where are they? Why are they out in the snowy dark with a 2 year old when they should be safely at home with In the Night Garden?

So tomorrow, in penance for all this exaggerated expectation, I shall join in further gritting of our church drive (apparently our labours yesterday have produced miraculous improvement; we just need to do it further up) so that we can have our lovely Midnight Mass tomorrow. And then I hope to drive sedately along the M8 to join my family for Christmas dinner. It's been an interesting Advent of flu, cancellations and anxiety followed by relief as family travelled the country to be with us - it would be good to relax for a bit. Especially if someone else is doing the cooking ...