Nobody does Christmas better than the Phillips family.
Growing up in our home each calendar year was split into 2 parts.
BC and AD. Before Christmas and After (christmas) Dinner. We are such suckers for the christmas spirit that we would be pumping Bony M
"By the Rivers of Babylon" and other such festive jingles as soon as we waved goodbye to the exam month of November and welcomed in December first! And we played them so consistently and with such great gusto, that our neighbours couldn't help but join in with a rousing chorus of
"Rocking around the christmas tree" by the time the big day actually arrived.
Advent calendars, tinsle, singing lights and songs about chestnuts, snow and reindeers were all part of the christmas fare...
and it didn't even matter that temperatures were soring into the high 30's and that the closest we had come to a white christmas was in the December of 1998 when the suncream bottle top came loose as I shook it above my head.
Like I said, my family has christmas waxed!
It's with these seasonal musings that I turn the pages to the first chapters of Matthew and Luke's Gospel accounts and dig a little deeper into how that first "christmas" went down. Compared to our Zimbabwean rendition of the yuletide occassion, the bible paints a pretty bleek picture of what happened +-2000 years ago. I mean for goodness sake there's not even one mention of a turkey or snow!
In fact when we get down to the bare bones of things, that initial "christmas" gathering didn't have nearly as much sparkle and glamour that we attach to our present day celebrations. Sure there was some gold, frankincense and myrrh (by the way, "myrrh" isn't worth as many points as you would think when playing Scrabble) and they definitely had some high profile guests (Wisemen attendance and angelic visitation definitely trump our usual christmas visitors - deaf grandparents and the creepy neighbour from down the street who somehow always seems to wangle an invite) but overall Mary and Joseph's soiree doesn't come remotely close to our jovial and expensive traditions.
The long and the short of my ramblings is that this year things are going to be different for me. No, I'm not losing the tree, the carols or the mince pies but I've decided to add some new traditions to the Phillips family list (said list will be in the next blog). We live in Africa where despite our best attempts to hide behind high walls, to turn a blind eye at traffic lights and to take alternative routes home so we don't have to go through "the bad neighbourhood", poverty, disease, joblessness and an all round lack of hope is running rampant. To pretend anything else or to sugar-coat the problem by turning our christmas carol volume up and putting our fingrs in our ears to not hear the cries is just as evil as those who turned Mary and Joseph away that fateful night in Nazareth by saying,
"We have no room."
This year, I'm asking myself the question,
"Do I have room?"
Do I have room in my heart, in my home, in my budget for the lost, the last and the least...
...or do I just have room for a second helping of the christmas ham?
