THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

It’s the twelfth day of Christmas as I write. The decorations are all carefully taken down and packed away until next Christmas, so home feels rather empty.

Any particularly observant visitor to either of our churches through this Christmas season will have noticed that the Crib at the front of the church houses the animals of the stable.

Having remembered my childhood memories of the wonder of an Advent Calendar at the beginning of this month, now I am recalling that writing thank you letters in the week after Christmas was also very special to me. Perhaps unusually for a child, I would be keen to start writing “thank yous” on Boxing Day. When I look back, what I notice is that deciding how I was going to say thank you was even better than unwrapping the present, because I was having time to think about how m

During Advent, as in Lent, Christians traditionally practiced prayer, fasting and self-examination. It is worth pausing to reflect on Advent themes. They are not all comfortable,