Every year since I started blogging I have done some sort of Christmas post, usually something to do with "the real meaning of Christmas". This year I'm a fortnight into January, and my most recent post is still from the 10th December!
It seems to me to have been a very dark midwinter. Extended-family-wise situations have varied between stressful and downright frightening; healthwise CFS has been exhausting; UK-politics-wise has seen a barely veiled policy of favouring the rich and taxing the poor; US-politics-wise we have "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" - tax cuts for the wealthy and persecution for the whistle-blowers (not to mention the division in that deeply divided, and extremely violent, country resulting in yet another shooting atrocity); in Cote d'Ivoire there's another African 'strong-man' who won't relinquish power, financed, in this case, by the multi-national chocolate manufacturers Nestle, Mars/M&Ms and Hershey (although not Cadbury, yet); there are major floods in Brazil and Australia; and clearing up from last year's earthquake in Haiti doesn't seem to be happening.
Maybe, for me, this year's "real meaning of Christmas" is a line from the opening section of John's Gospel: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." Please?
