Twelfth Night

So it's Saturday morning, it's pouring with rain, I've taken Rachel to dancing and Daniel to Winchester and now I'm putting off taking down the Christmas decorations for another year. It doesn't matter that I know the point of a celebration is that it is a marker, a defined point in time to note transition or difference, or that the reason that we are very traditional and have don't decorate until Christmas Eve and then take them down for Twelfth Night is because we want to celebrate Christmas at Christmas, not celebrate during Advent and then give up and act as though it doesn't matter as soon as we go back to work or school; I still hate taking down the Christmas decorations and having the house looking suddenly bare and plain and... ordinary.

I guess that that's part of the meaning of Christmas for christians: it's really easy to get excited about the Incarnation, about the possibility of Christ being born into our lives, about the promise of new life in him, just as it's easy to get excited about the birth of any baby. And just as with any baby, for the first couple of weeks there's a sense of amazement, of wonder; but wonder wears off and life becomes sleepless nights and nappy changing and feeding, and we have to make a conscious effort to look at our children and think "You are an amazing thing: a completely separate life that somehow I helped to make".

So here's a Twelfth Night challenge: to take down the decorations, to end the celebration of birth, but to keep hold of the wonder, and daily to see Christ present in our sometimes bare and plain and ordinary lives.