In many cold climes Advent days are short and cold. There is the business of the season but also the desire for calm and peace to settle upon our world, and upon the whole world, if that can be.

Inside, homes are warm and the festive joy grips families. Old folks become kids again and even busy parents take time for annual rituals, like trimming the Christmas tree, singing some carols, perhaps dusting off a Bible – or at least the Story.

And yes, it will be a sad, lonely even bitter Christmas for many. Perhaps the way it usually is.

We ‘wish’ folk a Merry Christmas, with thought or without. And perhaps if we do think about it, there’s a kind of whist-fullness in our wish - that it may really be so, for others and for ourselves.

The busy days descend but the whirlwind soon lifts as well, hopefully drawing spirits into - and then up and out of, the brightness of  Christmas-tide, warming hearts, flooding us with good and special memories of former days.

All too much braised with nostalgia, perhaps, and with a kind of romance that defies reality, now as it did then.

But somehow still, it bubbles up or along like a stream by winter’s ice, warming us within in a way that eggnog and Bristol Cream never quite can. There’s the feeling of Christmas – even  the beliefs of Christmas – that still there's coming, if not this year – One Year, One Day, maybe soon - the Hope and Peace and Joy and Love that our hearts seek.

And so we do it all again. And the feelings and the thoughts and the actions of love are but prologue and foretaste to the Real that in Christ will surely come. His first Advent makes us very eager for His next – and for the full and final of all that’s promised, every year – at Christmas.