January 2025
…that time of year when we look back on the year just past and when we all regret the excesses of the Christmas season, making resolutions to eat less, drink less and lose weight! I wonder how many of us get to the end of the month without breaking our New Year’s resolutions?
January can be a depressing month. The excitement and stresses of Christmas are over. Our rooms look bare once the cards have been taken down…Christmas trees look forlorn, devoid of all their trimmings. It can be an anticlimax. And the weather is usually pretty miserable too! But January is also the beginning of something new…a new year…and no one knows what this year will bring. It may be that 2025 holds some important event for us….a big birthday or anniversary…children taking important exams or applying for university places…a change of house or job or career. In the life of our diocese it will probably mean a new Bishop.
Some people view change with suspicion but change can be good and positive change can bring growth and renewal. By making new year’s resolutions we are hoping to bring about change but often our good intentions are about making life better for ourselves. Maybe this year we can think about making life better for others, perhaps sponsoring a child in India, or buying an Oxfam alternative gift….buying a goat, or training a teacher. Perhaps the money you save by keeping your resolutions to eat and/or drink less could be put to such good uses! We can also make a difference to farmers in poor countries by buying fairly traded products - and to our own farmers by buying local.
So once again we go into a new year, not knowing what it will hold for us. One thing of which I am certain is that, whatever lies in store for us in 2025, God will be with us, guiding us, strengthening us, comforting us, challenging us. We may break the promises we make to ourselves at the beginning of a new year but God will never break his promise to us, the promise to be with us, always.
I hope that 2025 will be a good and peaceful year for you all.
Every blessing to you and those you love.
Susan (retired priest in the East Vale and Avon Benefice)
december Thoughts on Christmas
Hi everyone
I’m writing this mid-November, but it must be time to start getting things ready for Christmas; out walking with the dog earlier today I saw the first Christmas tree on display in a nearby garden, the lights shining so brightly in the gathering dusk – it looked really lovely and very cheering to anyone walking past.
Christmas “to do” lists! Do you have one? When I was a child, “getting ready for Christmas” was all about opening the numbered door on our Advent Calendar (which I often had to share with my little sister), and looking forward to the Christmas party on the last day of term after the carol service and Nativity Play the day before. Advent Calendars years ago were all pretty similar, with little variation between them. Glitter or not, chocolates behind the doors or not, and some fairly trad pictures of a suspiciously clean stable with Mary and Joseph, baby Jesus and a couple of animals looking on, plus a few blue-eyed fair-haired angels up on the stable roof. But these days there is so much more variety! Pop-up or slot-together calendars, calendars with anything from varieties of gin or make-up -to Lego or even coffee pods. There are calendars covered in snowmen, or dogs wearing tartan scarves, calendars with Christmas gonks or trains, calendars decorated with superheroes or snowflakes. You can go full Mary -and-Joseph-and-the-wee-donkey or avoid absolutely any mention of “the reason for the season” if that’s the way you want to do things. I think it’s great that there is so much more choice, allowing everyone who wants to, to find some way of counting down the days in a style that puts a smile on your face when you open that little door. An Advent calendar is designed to give you a moment of happiness, feel that positive sense of anticipation –completely opposite to that stress which can gather when Grown-up You looks at the “To Do” list.
And yet whatever age we are, Advent is about getting ready for Christmas. It’s about clearing space – physical or spiritual, so you can look forward with joy and excitement to the birth of a baby who was - and still is – the sign that God is with us, that God loves us, cares about us, and wants to be with us where we are, This is such good news that the Church goes right on telling that story any way we can – because it is a story that we believe is still worth telling, which the world still needs to hear. This year we are telling it with candle-lit carol services and Nativities in the traditional way – but you can also open our doors at various places and times in the Advent season to cheer the arrival of Mary & Joseph in Cleeve Prior, (Friday 6th) join a posse of “Celebrating Santas” (Sunday 8th December), dress up at an “DIY Nativity” (22nd) or help tell the story of the Nosy Mouse on Christmas Day itself.
If you want to find out more, have a look at our website for details of all our events across the 6 churches https://eastvaleavon.com/. Whichever of our doors you open, whatever reason you have for coming in, you will be warmly welcomed.
On behalf of all our congregations across the Vale, I wish you a very happy Christmas, and a peaceful New Year.
Jo Fielding, Priest in Charge, East Vale & Avon Benefice.