When we switch on our Christmas lights, in St Albans and Harpenden, we are joining the whole world in a celebration of light in darkness.
There are dozens of light shows in and around London alone, adorned with literally millions of lights, and equally large numbers in any city you care to name.
Even at St Saviour’s Sandpit Lane, St Albans, we’ll be joining the age-old, world-wide light fest, with 100 decorated trees twinkling with hundreds of lights, in a magical forest inside the darkened church . (Yes, it’s our much-loved triennial Christmas Tree Festival from December 16 to 23.)
Celebrations around the winter solstice go back to the Bronze Age – to Stonehenge and beyond. The Christian Christmas may have appropriated the ancient celebration around the winter solstice, but not in a negative way.
Christians have always recognised the need to empathise with people’s deep feelings. The desire to fight back against the darkness, embodied by winter, with a symbol of hope, embodied in light, is one of the deepest.
So it is perfectly OK to celebrate the festival of light-in-darkness as an ancient ritual and a Christian feast.
Celebrating Christmas, however, is more than rejoicing in the light: the feast talks of God deliberating disrupting the darkness with a tiny ray of light that is a baby, weak, vulnerable, like a candle flame, but capable of lighting up the world.
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