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Music: God Rest Ye Merry GentlemenÌý The Choir of King's College Cambridge

Turning to my earliest memories of Christmas, my mind is filled with all the contrasts between the cards and the climate! I spent my first nine Christmases in the tropics, in Nigeria where I was born, and then in Zimbabwe. But even as we sweltered in the heat, we were all sending each other cards with robins in the snow and snow-covered Christmas trees. For me the snow and the firs were as distant and magical as the snowy woods of Narnia where Mr. Tumnus strolled arm in arm with Lucy in his red muffler and his snow-covered umbrella.

But if the great day never brought snow, it always brought something from Father Christmas, the one person from Narnia who seemed to come into our world too, and I have layer on layer of memories of those excited early mornings when I would wake before my parents and discover what treasures he had left in my stocking.

But one special Christmas , when I was still very young, shines clear in my memory.

We used to go ‘home’ to England by sea every year, usually in the summer, but this particular year we set off just before Christmas. It was to be my first Christmas at sea, and I was a little anxious! We would be far out at sea on Christmas Eve, well out of sight of land. What if Father Christmas couldn’t find us? My mother said it would be fine, but I was not so sure.

On Christmas Eve, all the children were invited to the ship’s dining hall for a special party, timed to end just before bedtime, and there were all kinds of games and good things to eat. And then, just in the midst of it all, we heard a crackling on the Tannoy, and suddenly we could hear everything that was being said up on the bridge! Someone must have pressed the wrong button! But it was fun to eavesdrop. We heard the captain’s familiar voice telling the helmsman to keep her steady. We heard the engineer report that all was well in the engine rooms. And then suddenly we heard an alarmed call from the navigator: ‘Something on the radar sir! North Northwest, approaching swiftly! Shall I take evasive action?’ ‘Hold your course steady’ called the Captain, ‘let’s see if I can get a sighting through the binoculars’. Down in the dining room we all held our breath.

‘Oh yes! Yes, it is!’ came the captain’s jubilant voice, ‘It’s him! Slow and steady’, he called to the engineer, ‘bring her over, and cut the furnace for a moment, we don’t want too much heat and smoke when he comes down the funnel. All right everybody, prepare to take on an extra passenger!’

And then we heard a blast of the whistle and all kinds of clanging and clattering, (that’ll be the reindeer’s hooves on the funnel I thought, in awe). Then there was silence, and a few minutes later three figures emerged through the dining room doors. The first was the captain looking very smart in his full uniform, then, grinning from ear to ear beneath his flowing white beard, as large as life and twice as natural, the portly, scarlet-clad figure of Father Christmas himself, followed swiftly by the engineer with an oil can in one hand and a white rag in the other, still trying to brush the last of the soot off Father Christmas’s cape! I was overjoyed. And it was all as good as it could possibly be. Father Christmas called each of us by name and there were presents for everyone.

We would still be on board that ship for a while before we finally got home, but for me, the voyage was transformed.

Music: I saw three ships come sailing in Winchester College Chapel Choir

And now, in the glow of that memory, I feel the same way. Here we are, all on the same ship, on this dark and dangerous voyage through the last of 2024, and on into the unknown seas of 2025, a voyage that seems to get darker with every passing day. But we are not alone. If Father Christmas could join our ship out in mid-ocean, then I have no doubt that One Greater Than Father Christmas, still comes, even through these winter storms, these high waves of war and calamity, to be onboard with us on this voyage.

Now, when I seek a gift-bearing harbinger of Christmas as an adult, I turn from Father Christmas to Mother Mary. If I had imagined Father Christmas’s journey to our ship as perilous, then how much more exposed and dangerous was the coming of our saviour in the womb of his mother and on the straw of the manger.Ìý In a poem calledÌý ‘It’s Getting Darker’, I thought of Mary, making her way through Bethlehem, then an occupied city, as so many pregnant and vulnerable women must be doing now in places across the world, but carrying within her, the hidden light of the world, the one tiny hope amidst our hopelessness, the great gift for which the world was waiting:

It’s Getting DarkerÌý

It’s getting darker, darker all the time

And she is weary and beset with fear

Yet in the darkness of her womb he stirs,

Her tiny hope, the one who is to come.

So on she plods, on past the hostile stares

The checkpoints and the soldiers on the street

Seeking some shelter, somewhere to retreat

And bring toÌýÌý

She finds her shelter now and we attend her

Attend this burdened girl who speaks for us,

Whispers to God a broken world’s soft ‘yes,

‘Come to be born with us, come find us here

Outface for us the darkness we can’t face,

Show us the face of Love that casts out fear’.

That poem had been commissioned by St. John’s College Cambridge and was set beautifully to music by Joanna Marsh in an anthem called The Hidden Light. As you hear it, I wish for the blessings of that hidden light on you and yours this Christmas and in the coming year.

Music:Ìý ‘The Hidden Light’ anthem sung by the Choir of St. John’s College Cambridge