More than a decade ago, I spent early December on a university choir tour to Germany. In a chocolate-box village near Bonn, we had to leave our bus stuck in a snowdrift and continue on foot to our hotel. We were swiftly sidetracked into the local St Nicholas Day celebrations, culminating, after a few gluhweins, in a singsong to celebrate the opening of the village’s ‘Christmas window’, a nativity scene set up in the window of the village hall. Several enthusiastic renditions of “Lustig, lustig tralalalala” later we wandered back off into the snowy night.
Silence filled the square.
Trailing at the back, I turned around. The snow was on the ground still, turning to a muddy slush where we had trampled it. The street lamps were on but the brightest light by far was from the nativity scene in the newly revealed Christmas window.
Soon all the seasonal trappings of this Christmas will have faded, the office parties will be over, the late-night present wrapping sessions done and the mulled wine drunk. All that will remain is all that ever mattered in the first place: the knowledge that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.
Frances Stratton
