WHERE LIKE STARS

It's getting towards midnight. Normally at this time I'd be settling into a pew, listening to the choir at Holy Trinity singing around the tree. The tall church would be decked with festive banners and candles and the air would be cold and joyful as we shuffled in and waited.

There'd be the laminated Bethlehem carol sheets and the parish news, and I'd clutch them both in gloved hands, sitting on a cushion, ready for the moment, for the choir to process and for the Midnight Communion to begin.

Not this year. No white-gowned curate, no giving of the peace, no reflection, no carols. I wonder what I'd have made of that a year ago.

Instead, I'm at home, contemplating the very thing I said I'd like the least - waking up in a house on my own on Christmas Day. I'm okay with it tonight, I think. Tomorrow will be alright. And there are plenty of people worse off than me, waking up to much lonelier times. It seems immoral not to be grateful.

And I do feel Christmassy! Perhaps it was listening to the audiobook of A Christmas Carol today (maybe a new tradition?), perhaps it was helping my bubble prep the vegetables, perhaps it was delivering all the gifts to all the right houses this afternoon, like a sort of middle-aged Santa - in a Toyota Auris.

I looked up at the stars just now, much as I would if I were to walk back to the Intrepids' place from Holy Trinity. They were outshining the neon lights a billion to one - bright and brilliant, and somehow singing in their cold, silent melody. It reminded me of the last and most magnificent verse of Once in Royal David's City:

Not in that poor lowly stable
With the oxen standing by,
We shall see Him; but in heaven,
Set at God's right hand on high
Where like stars His children crowned
All in white shall wait around

The organ might not be ringing in my ears tonight, nor the soaring notes of the descant sung by the choir; there might have been no burst of 'Yea Lord we greet thee' or an ecclesiastical blessing to send us out into Christmastide... but there certainly was a cathedral, and there certainly was a chorus of praise in the heavens prompting everything within me to join the celebration.

And so I shall. Happy Christmas.