Looking back at Christmas

For the first time in a long while I didn’t take much notice of Christmas. And New Year is nothing for me. It strikes me as an arbitrary date and an uninteresting concept. What matters about Christmas is the thing that the Archbishop of Canterbury pointed out recently……“Christmas was when it was because it fitted well with the winter festival”.Each year it seems that some insensitive clergyman pops up to lament that Christmas is becoming less Christian and more commercial. Hello! It IS a pagan festival, can I remind you? If you don’t want anything to do with it, then shift your church calendar around.Hamish was here in January and he gave me a quite marvelous late Christmas present of a pagan image. A Green Man, his face sprouting oak leaves. I hung it in the office (what had been my dining room until recently ). It’s a lovely thing, and, whilst I was out, I think Hamish spent a lot of time just sitting there looking at it. Incidentally H. has some arboreal expertise and is quite fascinating on the topic of oak, ash, elm and all the rest. We talked a lot about the personal significance that the oak tree has for me. And of course we marveled again at the lovely story of Charles II hiding in an oak tree during his escape to France. That story is too good to be true, but it is.Meanwhile the Green Man has for several weeks now been sending out nice waves of…….well, what?……I couldn’t begin to describe it.