How will you spend Christmas day? Do you like listening to Christmas songs?

Dear Christa,

My plan this Christmas Day is to get up early, jump into the cold English sea, meditate, and then go to church. By the time I get home the household will be awake. My son, Luke, will be there with his wife, Sasha, and my little grandson, Roman – it’s his first Christmas – and so will Earl and his partner, Yustyna. Susie’s family will arrive late morning, and our friend Andrew Dominik will also join us. After opening presents we will have lunch – some will eat the chicken that Susie will cook, and some of us will work our way through a despairing slice of nut roast. Some will have a drink and some will not, and over the plum pudding there will be conversations, agreeable and disagreeable. Later, we’ll walk on the beach, and when we return to the house there will be more eating and drinking and laughter and conversation, which, no doubt, will be considerably less agreeable. Someone might try to play The Little Drummer Boy on the piano, and someone else, Silent Night. Some will fall asleep, some, like me, will stay awake and watch others demolish a bottle of port and a pile of mince pies. We’ll all watch A Charlie Brown Christmas, with Vince Guaraldi’s peerless Christmas score, and I’ll hold Susie’s hand because Arthur is not there.

And somewhere, amid the feasting and joyful human messiness – this beautiful, this happy, this sorrowful estate – I will acknowledge how extraordinarily fortunate my family and I are to have this good Christmas Day. I will remember, too, amongst all the making and the doing, the energising principle around which this day revolves that speaks so eloquently of rebirth and renewal, and the end to waiting – that of a mother bearing a child in a stable, revitalising the world for all eternity.

I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy and peaceful New Year.

Love, Nick

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