Dear Sir,
We can’t advise Mr Baalham (November en) who advocates cancelling Christmas. We can however point out a few consequences of the line he has taken. We have been subject to such opinions for the last 14 years.
Our son-in-law told us, before he and our daughter were married, that he, ‘didn’t celebrate Christmas’. It had been our custom to attend morning service on Christmas day before enjoying Christmas lunch, gifts, family games and a pleasurable day of relaxation.
Christmas 2000 was the first bleak one we had ever known. We have never attended churches that had a plethora of Christmas activities as Mr Baalham describes. We have had, on the Lord’s Day before the 25th, a service of carols and Bible readings with a sermon dwelling on the incarnation. A shorter service for prayer and thanksgiving took place on Christmas morning. But our son-in-law would take part in none of these. We ate our cheese sandwich in the church after the service, visited a member who was close to heaven and went home to an empty house.
It would be an understatement to recount our misery. Many people spend Christmas alone without being miserable, but for us, it didn’t have to be this way. Our ‘holier than thou’ family, the ones whose turn it was to be with us, had cancelled Christmas.
There is nothing new or original in what Mr Baalham has to say. Our relatives send no cards, give no gifts (but they do receive gifts and allow their children to have them). They have withdrawn themselves from all activities that are redolent of the season and without doubt have opened up a chasm, one that has proved to be unbridgeable, between themselves and the rest of the family, friends and members of the church they attend.
Yours faithfully,
