Do you have an advent calendar? Have you sent someone else one?
These days you can get all sorts and they are made with adults as well as children in mind. There are those that produce a daily chocolate for example. Others a tea bag. Or a gin. Or a weekly pair of socks. There are so many around to choose from.
When I was growing up, an advent calendar was a “holy” picture with lots of numbered doors or windows marked on it.
When you opened one, it led to another picture.
That picture would be of a star, or of an angel, or reindeer or robins and on December 25th – there would be a picture of a baby in a straw-filled crib.
Did you know though, that your average advent calendar, of whatever sort, is in fact cheating you?
If they truly are advent calendars, then they should begin their door opening four Sundays before Christmas.
That often means a few days before the month of December actually starts.
This year you would get an extra two days of calendar – other years it can be even more.
Advent is all about counting down the Sundays, not the chocolates.
Advent is about waiting…
It is about waiting for something that is every bit as sweet as a sweetie but far more substantial – about something much better for you and longer lasting.
This year, as December begins, we have no real idea of how Christmas is going to pan out. Even after the first minister’s announcement last Tuesday, it looks as though Christmas 2020 will be very different from any other.
For some people there will be the prospect of being home alone.
For others, the three households rule may mean we have to choose who comes and joins us at Christmas and who will have to make alternative arrangements.
And if at the last minute the rules change again there will be disappointment for some while there will be those who will breathe a big sigh of relief because for them, grief, or poverty, illness or debt makes this time of the year so hard to get through.
For these people, cancelling Christmas would be so much easier.
But in fact every one of these scenarios is covered in the real Christmas story.
The real Christmas story is not about presents.
It is not even about food and family gatherings.
What the real Christmas story is about, is displacement, homelessness, upset, separation from family, as well as poverty and isolation. The real Christmas story takes place in the light of political decisions made, that a young couple with no financial cushion to fall back on, had no control over and simply had to endure.
I think I have spotted a gap in the market. There is no advent calendar out there that deals with real life. There is no daily door opening that offers debt advice or a phone number that you can dial which, if you have no one close, you can use to talk with another human being.
There is no calendar that offers odd plates to smash to help work through anger or that supplies tissues that people can cry into or an understanding shoulder that folk can lean on.
There is no calendar that links you directly to your MP or MSP so that you can question policies or decisions or help shape what this country does now and in the future.
I guess what I am saying is that this year especially, the real Christmas story needs to be allowed to take centre stage again.
Not the trappings that have grown up around it. Not the myths we lay over it. And certainly not all the commerce around it.
The reality of the desperate world that God chose to step into needs to be allowed to echo down through the centuries, so that God’s love is given a face and hands and heart right here, right now, in 21st century Scotland, allowing the words spoken that first Christmas, to resonate with everyone today.
It is for the poorest, the most dispossessed, for those who hurt most that the child was born.
Alleluia.
The Right Rev Susan Brown is minister of Dornoch Cathedral and the former moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland
