I didn’t get to post a Christmas message this year. So here are some post-Christmas thoughts, which suggest the reason.

We hear a lot about commercialisation and the season’s overwhelming stress: sermons and exhortations about the true meaning of Christmas. We’re told to slow down, find a little space. Absolutely: we need more peace and tranquility, and not just at Christmas. Achieving it requires determination though: turning down invitations; buying fewer gifts; sending fewer cards; declining even good things like carol services, concerts or nativity plays — and neglecting a blog post. In fact, it needs a strong mind. There’s a balance of course. Scrooge rejected the whole lot, the entire concept: an easy option but as the three ghosts taught him, BIG mistake. No, that’s not the way, but the right balance is different for each of us: different circumstances, different needs, changing over time.  In any case, it’s more to do with mind than circumstance; we can find serenity, even when the world seems a whirling chaos.

For Mary and Joseph, the first Christmas was a frantic, hectic affair. It’s about 75 miles as the crow flies from Nazareth to Bethlehem, but 110 miles on foot, avoiding Samaria, with a climb of around 3,000 feet at the end – about a week’s hard journey. For a heavily pregnant lady, it may have taken longer and would certainly be an ordeal. Then, when they finally got there: a town overcrowded with people, bursting at the seams. Commercialisation? We can imagine streets filled with traders, shops and booths on every corner. And no place to stay! Talk about stress! Joseph must have been distraught, the best he could find was a stable. We imagine it was at least secluded and peaceful, but then, just after the birth, a bunch of strangers turn up: shepherds, sent by an angel. We can’t help thinking: “why did it have to be so difficult?  Couldn’t the Lord have got them to settle in Bethlehem sooner?” But from what little we’re told, it seems Mary and Joseph didn’t complain, just coped quietly and did the best they could. This, perhaps, is a key to Christmas stress, and perhaps a tutorial for our own journey through life.

Christmas is a time for nostalgia, and smells can trigger memories. Seventeen years ago, shortly before Christmas, Barbara and I had spent most of the day at my mother’s house (the house where I grew up as a child) getting new carpets fitted, a calm day with barely a breath of wind. As we were leaving in the late afternoon.I smelt a smell outside that transported me back more than half a century.  It was the smell of smoke from a coal fire. Younger generations have never even seen a coal fire; but if you’re old enough you’ll know the smell is distinctive. In my childhood a coal fire was the main source of heat for ordinary families. Only the rich and wealthy had central heating. In the winter, if a family had been out all day, the house would be freezing. When they got home the first flurry of activity was to get the fire lit as quickly as possible. There were techniques for banking up fires so they smouldered slowly and didn’t go out; but that used up expensive fuel, so in my family at least it was only done on special occasions, like Christmas Eve.

Since a fire was the main source of heat, typically only one room in the house was warm. On cold winter evenings the family would stay together sitting round the fire, making occasional dashes to a freezing cold kitchen to get a drink or a snack. A special treat was a warm cup of cocoa before bedtime. Drinking chocolate hadn’t been invented then, and there was a skilful art to making a lump-free drink of cocoa.  And of course, bread was toasted over the coal fire with a long-handled toasting fork; it just doesn’t taste the same from a toaster.  While the bread was toasting, the butter brought from the kitchen pantry like a brick of yellow concrete, was softening on the hearth.

What did we do while we sat around the fire drinking cocoa and munching toast?  Well, we talked to one another. Conversation is a forgotten art in many families. We listened to the radio – this was before the days of television – Journey into Space and Dick  Barton, Special Agent on the BBC Light Programme were two of my favourites. Radio doesn’t suppress conversation as much as TV does. And we would play games together. The board game Ludo was a favourite in my family; then there was Snakes and Ladders which I didn’t like so much; dominoes, which I did like, and Lotto, or Housey Housey – that was what Bingo was called when it was still a parlour game, before it became commercialised gambling. Then there was card games like Happy Families and Snap. Central heating and television have destroyed this kind of family life, although I’m glad about the Clean Air Act.

Now what has this got to do with Christmas?  Well, I think the message and meaning of Christmas is tied up with my trip down memory lane. I believe that metaphorically and perhaps on occasion literally, the Saviour hopes we will invite friends or family to join us round our fireside, to share the warmth, drink our cocoa and munch our toast, It was an angel that invited the shepherds to the stable, and perhaps we should do the same, remembering that an ancient, obscure stable symbolises the love of God, and the salvation of mankind, which is the whole point of Christmas. As the carol says of Bethlehem: “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight”.