Christmas tidings to heal the spirit

I Love the  prayer i copied below, which brings us the tidings of a cleansed peaceful joy. This year has been both sad and joyful,  and I am still trying to make sense of it all. To make sense of the death of those close to you is hard especially when trying to explain it to a child. it brings into question all our beliefs and forces us to look at the essence of our belief. All I can say is that prayer has helped and that fellow Christians have helped. Which is why it is so important for us to be in a community, you cannot go it alone. 


 Prayer for Christmas Morning

by Robert Louis Stevenson

The day of joy returns, Father in Heaven, and crowns another year with peace and good will.
Help us rightly to remember the birth of Jesus, that we may share in the song of the angels, the gladness of the shepherds, and the worship of the wise men.
Close the doors of hate and open the doors of love all over the world?
Let kindness come with every gift and good desires with every greeting.
Deliver us from evil, by the blessing that Christ brings, and teach us to be merry with clean hearts.
May the Christmas morning make us happy to be thy children,
And the Christmas evening bring us to our bed with grateful thoughts, forgiving and forgiven, for Jesus sake.
Amen

So this Christmas, for all of us who have suffered a loss and need kindness, reach out to kindred spirits and let the powerful cleansing and wholeness of Christmas heal you.

St Nicholas a children's saint

Today for many children in Europe it is a day of bounty and joy! Sint Nicholas, patron saint of children distributes presents and goodwill galore. Being Dutch, this is my favourite day of all, I well remember the excitement of waiting for Sint Nicholas to arrive on a boat from Spain, together with his helpers called black peters (zwarte pieten!), who dressed as 17th century court pages add to the fun by carrying round a bag with presents, but also mock to punish children who misbehave. When you get older and no longer believe in  Saint Nicholas, riding on his white horse on the roofs of houses, the evening before Sint Nicholas feast, on 5 December is a time when adults will give each other'surprises' or small presents often with a joke attached and accompanied by poems describing, the personality and perhaps faults of the recipient.

Good clean fun and a good occasion to give each other a present. Especially as for me this helps christmas take on a more religious and family meaning, and is not so overrun with commercial present giving. For children it is hard to distinguish the real meaning of Christmas and thus Saint Nicholas provides parents with a good occasion to split the commercial aspects of Christmas from the spiritual one