Still, we feel the tingle.

The picture postcard version of Christmas never happens – we don’t have snow or Victorian choirs. (We do have robins, and the recent arrival of a small baby though.)

Here we have been lashed and slashed by storm after storm and it is unnaturally warm. The darkness lasts even longer, before the hooded light bleeds in with a yellow hue, making the day seem reluctant, forboding.

The shadow behind this advent has been Gaza. I have mentioned it in passing during the course of these meditations but it has been there all along. How can we seek the truth of a story set in a place of such current brutality and violence? How can we seek justice through this story when the opposite of justice is so current? How can we seek peace in this story when children lie under the rubble of a building so recently collapsed? How can we talk of love when industrial slaughter is justified by hate and vengence right there in plain sight on our screens day-by-advent-day?

But then the answer comes. What else should we do, if not this?

What else is Christmas about?

I know, we can easily coorie in, behind our storm lashed window panes and make it all about us and those closest to us. We can hide in our own interior spaces and consume.

Like I am doing right now.

But Christmas eve is not for guilt, it is for wonder.

It is for being open to the possibility of goodness, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

It is about Emmanuel, God with us, promising peace on earth, if we will heed his call to make it, one house at a time.

It is about love, for family yes, but also spilling out wider to embrace as many as we can.

So, dear friends, may your home be warm this winter. May the lights be bright. May the table be loaded with goodness and may you be loved, not because you have earned it, but just because you are beautiful.

May whatever you have be enough.

If threre is an anthem to this Christmas eve, perhaps it is this one. Glen Hansard and Lisa O’Neil, performing Shane MaGowan’s old party song with such tenderness and joy at his funeral…