3[rd] Sunday in Advent 2018: Hollowell 

We are in the home straight. After getting my pounds and kilograms mixed up, I have finally managed to order a turkey that the five of us will be able to consume without having to put up with cold turkey for days after our Christmas lunch. 

However, I confess that as I get older Christmas holds fewer attractions.  That may be because we no longer have small children running about on Christmas Day.  
 
Christmas seems to have got out of hand with the publicity starting immediately after Halloween and carols playing on the musak for weeks and weeks. How shop assistants stand it I can't imagine.  But I have to confess also that I have added my share to the nation's 3 trillion odd pound credit debt racking my brains to find presents for all the family.  I have much sympathy with the parishoners of Penwortham near Preston who some years ago banned Christmas, with all its overtones of materialism, in favour of the Feast of the Nativity.   

But before we get carried away with self righteousness, it is as well to remember that in Britain today, where there are very few shared beliefs ( surrounded as we are by multiculturalism)   Christmas is probably the only time in this country when we all come together in some kind of shared belief system. 

In a recent interview the former Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor has pointed out that it's remarkable that non-Christian Britain has stayed with the festival and adapted it and re-written it.  It's very embracing.  

I'm sure we all know quite a few non-Christians  -  not just " no longer Christians" but non-Christian families  -  who treat Christmas as the moment when you think about family and when you give money to the poor. 

Dickens articulates that so dazzlingly in the Christmas Carol, that Christmas is about Past, Present and Future.   [  Read from Christmas Carol, the nephew's dialogue with Scrooge. ] 

But how , MacGregor is asked by the interviewer,  can that view of Christmas be aligned with its materialism, so  hollow and crass ? Doesn't he worry about the commercialisation ??  

Festival are always commercial, is his response. They are about having fun.  The point of a Festival is that you splash out. 

So my message today is that we can balance the glitz,and fun with the need to get involved as much as we can in the charitable side of Christmas and the needs of our fellow men and women. 

And here's how Dickens describes the practical way that Ebeneezer Scrooge approaches it with his clerk Bob Crachit.
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I hope we can all say Amen to the spirit  of that command. . 
