They told me not to send out a prayer letter at Christmas, because nobody ever reads them. So instead I’m going to dump the unprocessed contents of my brain onto the blog:

• I have spent the past three days cooking. No, really, cooking. In fact, I have been staying over at church to get all the cooking done. I laughingly agreed to cook Christmas dinner for the church a few months back. As Jeremy Clarkson would say, “How hard can it be?” Well, quite hard, but it’s going OK. The mince pies worked, the turkey is pretty much prepared and just needs a few hours in the oven in the morning, and then it’s on with the vegetables. Maybe, however, “Perhaps we need a Christmas cake as well” was not a good thing to think at the last minute. Tomorrow it will be all go.
• I am really very proud of my mince pies.
• Friday and Saturday was just me cooking, but today I had “help” from some of the ladies in the church. Trying to get across culinary instructions in Japanese was ridiculous, and it would have been more efficient to do it all myself. But it would have been so much less relational. There’s the Christian life right there.
• I took a break from cooking on Friday to write today’s sermon. I gave a very liberationist Christmas message - it’s just a product of my certain strange way of seeing the world. Everyone can see if they think about it that the shepherds were dirty, smelly, homeless people sleeping on the hills, and that the magi were Gentile foreigners, and that Joseph’s family in Bethlehem (Of course he had family there, it was his home town, that’s why he was going there) would apparently have nothing to do with him because of the shame of him being a father out of marriage, but you don’t often get to follow all that through in a Chrstmas sermon.
• The strange thing I’m finding is that the further I go down the liberationist route, the more positive feedback I get from the congregation. I shall think about why this is and follow up later.
• Today I saw a one-day old baby and her mother. There is no finer sight in the world.
• I am very, very tired. And I still have another turkey to brine.