Shall we cancel Christmas this year??

Chick Yuill shared this on Good Morning Sunday on BBC Radio 2 - I wanted to share it with you

"When I got to the ripe old age of 40 I seriously thought about cancelling my birthdays for the rest of my life. You know the feeling – you just don’t want to be reminded that you’re getting older – but I soon changed my mind on that one – it wasn’t just the presents – it was the fact that I realised that that’s what birthdays are all about – getting older I mean

It’s a chance to look back, to remember the good times and the not so good and to take a deep breath and head into the next year. So I’m not cancelling my birthdays.

I feel the same about Christmas. Sometimes you think you should just ignore it – cancel the festive season, money’s tight, it’s become too commercialised, things are hard, a friendship has broken up, we’ve lost someone very close to us, we’re uncertain about the future, we feel guilty about celebrating when there’s so much to be concerned about.

But that’s exactly why we shouldn’t cancel the yuletide festivities. Christmas is not an attempt to escape from the problems for a couple of days. Christmas is all about the fact that love breaks through all those things, transforms them, makes sense of them.

We celebrate the season because a young peasant girl, whose fiancée almost broke off their engagement, gave birth to a baby, without the help of a midwife, in an outhouse, in the busyness of a Roman census, in an out of the way town, in the back of beyond – and in all that confusion the Christ-child was born – Love came down at Christmas as the carol reminds us.

So let’s not cancel Christmas, let’s make it a time to pause, to give thanks and to believe again in the Love that is greater than all the problems of life."

With every blessing for a Happy and Holy Christmas