Christmas

As I watch it unfold year after year I think back to my childhood with a great amount of, well im not sure really, but I loved Christmas as a kid. Sometimes they were white and I can remember one really well. The 24th was overcast but on the 25th as I woke there was silence and that strange glow that can only mean snow. It was, hooray. However, Christmas started long before that all of the last week in November there was a rumbling before, lights were turned on, trees put up and Christmas decorations taken down from the loft to be dusted and put back on the tree. I remember the little bits of paper with a sticky end you licked and made chains with, the misletoe and the holly. I remember Blue Peter and the collection of stamps for kids with no food in Biafra or other such worthy causes, followed by John Noakes, Peter Purves and good old Valerie, she was never Val setting light to the Blue Peter studio or standing in Elephant shit. Was life more simple then. Probably not but I rtemembered it as a special time, much the same as my son who is 3 is running around like a mad thing with his hay and food for the reindeer, and his eyes positively shone when we turned the lights on , on our tree at home. Christmas itself was different it was the only time you saw dates and tangerines and dried figs. Stockings had matchbox cars in them and nobody got a CD or a video game. But all the family came and spent the whole day stuffing themselves silly. Do I miss it, yes I do. About 6 or 7 years ago I visited Shek Pik Prison here in Hong Kong. The prisoners were to stage a nativity play, and as is the wont with males, the virgin Mary came in for a bit of stick and ample bossom stuffing. Actually there was two nativity plays one after the other, because you cant have all the prisoners together. Shek Pik is a glum place from the moment you walk in to the moment you leave it is unnerving, windswept and barren. But on that day a little light came into the lives of the prisoners. Imagine being dressed in brown all year and then the shear pleasure of dressing up as an angel or a sheperd, just dressing in some colour for a change, and not needing the sandals because you have them already. Imagine being able to have a laugh and a joke and listen to the salvation army brass band. And I guess, if you can imagine that, then I suppose you will have grasped what the spirit of Christmas is all about. For many of the prisoners that would be a day they would hold in their memory much longer than most of the toys others were given would last. I guess that it took that day to make me reaslise once again, that Christmas is not about what we get but, it is about what we give. For people who want to read what I wrote about that day, the article was published in the St Johns Catherdral magazine. If you do find a copy send it to me because I lost mine years ago. And on that note I would wish my reader a Merry Christmas