Wish I could be home for Christmas

Someone asked me yesterday what my favourite Christmas Carol was. I answered that there were a few I really like... and several that I really do not like terribly much!

He then asked me what my favourite Christmas ‘song’ was. That was more difficult to answer... but the answer is definitely not Slade’s ‘I wish it could be Christmas every Day’!

Nor would it be "Stop The Cavalry" by Jona Lewis, with its repeated line ‘wish I could be home for Christmas’. Nope, not my favourite. And yet I find myself humming it, singing it and whistling it a lot. Possibly that is because it has been playing in many shops I have been in during the weeks leading up to Christmas. But then, so have many other Christmas songs. I suspect that this one has stuck in my mind because I feel I can echo the sentiment.

I wish I could be home for Christmas.

I will, of course, be home and joining with the family for Christmas dinner etc. But this will be the first time in (almost) 40 years of marriage that Jane and I will not have been together on Christmas Eve, nor able to wish each other a Happy Christmas after the Watchnight Service and exchange our own Christmas gifts, and the first time in our family’s life when I have not been there first thing on Christmas Day and we have not been able to open our presents around the tree first thing in the morning.

I have Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services in the parish I am currently with in Perthshire while Jane has the same in her own parish. So we are miles apart.

Our children – although adults – are not terribly impressed! They have named it ‘Chrexit’!

I could easily (too easily) begin to feel sorry for myself. But a moment’s thought puts this all into perspective. A moment’s thought for those facing their first Christmas without a dear loved one, for those who will be alone all Christmas, for those who have been driven from their homes into distant lands by terror, war, famine or drought, for those without a home at all... and so on.

We have made Christmas into a feast of food, comfort and family. And I love all of that! But it does not truly represent what the first Christmas involved, and which still sounds alarmingly contemporary... people far from home, with nowhere to stay, no doubt anxious and unsettled, eventually driven by the terror instigated by a cruel ruler into a distant land, and so on...

When I do raise a glass with my family come 2pm on Christmas Day and when we settle down in the warmth of home to open our gifts and share in a sumptuous meal, I hope I don’t forget Mary and Joseph and the infant Jesus and what they faced, nor forget what so very many are facing this Christmas.

After all, after a brief (and in the scale of things, utterly insignificant) separation, I will be at home for Christmas.