Outside the Box

‘Christmas comes but once a year’ –
usually sometime around October. But it gives us a good long time to reflect on how we celebrate this great season.

The latest statistics I have show that in last year in Britain we bought 2.5 billion Christmas cards, which would have stretched nearly 240,000 miles laid end to end – nine times round the globe. I bet you wanted to know that!

We also used 370 million stamps and 85,000 miles of wrapping paper (of which our house contributed half, I believe.) In one of my studies of British Christmas cards I found that of 20 types of Christmas cards sold by WH Smith, only three had a religious theme.

On the other hand WH Smith did offer a tempting choice of a seasonal computer game depicting horrific car crashes or another seasonal book with the enticing title: ‘The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers’. So that was that year’s present list dealt with, then.

Relief is at hand though. The Sunday Times featured an article in their Style magazine which started off: ‘Hooray for this time of year, with its hedonism, its abandon and its indulgence.’
Might we have lost the plot somewhere down the line, do you think? Might it be time to try something a bit different, even a bit more Christian? After all, the Christ-child has rather more claim to national exposure than Father Christmas, popular as our reindeer-ed friend always is.

Our diocesan campaign this year is based on the slogan ‘Christmas – think outside the box’ this year. We’d like to ask people to look beyond all this beguiling Christmas ‘hedonism,’ and to try a fresh engagement with this most earthy of seasons.

The Christmas box in our west European culture is simply full. It’s chock full of food and fairy lights, of parties and presents, of TV and worse. Let’s think beyond all that and set ourselves one all-important question: ‘How can we in the church think outside the box, so that others will think outside the box, so that the box will be empty and earth will be full (of his glory)?’
If it isn’t too late to suggest it, I wonder if every one of our parishes could try just one small thing which thinks outside the box this year? Let’s ask for ideas from unlikely fringe members (thinking outside the box ourselves). Why not line the path to our carol services with lanterns from Ikea, or give out mulled wine and mince pies to passers by on the Saturday before Christmas, or drop a candle through every door with ideas for its use and a list of service times.

Let’s commend again this wonderful enchanted story to a disenchanted world.

Why?

Because He’s worth it.