Yesterday in KS1 I was feeling extremely forgetful and told the children a very strange Christmas story. My facts where all wrong, for example I talked about a young girl called Joanne, who was engaged to be married to a carpenter/builder called Bob, who took his wife on a journey on an elephant, to stay in the Hilton hotel! There was a rock star who visited a group of angels to share his latest hit single and three wise Santa Clauses who brought gifts. What a morning I was clearly having!
The response as you can image was that I was repeatedly shouted down and corrected, of course the young girl was called Mary, the journey was on a donkey, she was engaged to Joseph, it was clearly an angel that brought good news and although the visitors may have had white beards they were most certainly not Santa Claus.
The only thing I seemed to get right in the story was that it all centred around a baby, who was laid in a manger and was given the name Jesus.
As we lit our candle and took our time to reflect, we thought how Christmas can so easily become about so many other things and that it is so easy to miss the child who is at the centre of all of it. A child who came to show God's love in so many unexpected ways.
