DG strikes again

A day of easterly winds, a ferry going off (only the bathtub boats), and the Return of the Domestic Goddess, sticky fingered and late... Or, to put it more prosaically, I iced the Christmas cake today. The icing sugar - my preferred natural pale fawn stuff - came out of the packet like a mixture of shards of stone and a rattle of small teeth, meaning that I had to crush the whole bally lot with a rolling pin before sieving it into the bowl, so that there was a fine miasma of sugar in the very air of the kitchen. But that's it done, as you will see, and the last photo shows the path of my cake recipe (along with its icing) from a handwritten copy from a friend from my university days to a magazine page which may have been Egg Marketing Board advertising to a card version that came in a long-consumed box of a dozen eggs. I love their grades of antiquity in appearance ...

The rest of the day just ...was. I sorted out some clothes for going away and went out in the rain for 2kg of bread flour and a walk round the shore just because. And as I went, I was thinking about the season, and its significance to different people - a thought process that continued as I took the time to read some other blip journals.  And what I thought was this: People who have no connection whatsoever to church, to faith, to Christianity, tend in this country and others like it to celebrate the season as if they did, on the whole - carols on the radio, expecting vaguely Christian music as a backdrop until  Don't They Know it's Christmas starts up - that sort of thing. And most people in this country know the gist of the traditional story - even the Asian pupils I taught in my first school knew that. And I get the impression that they think people like me believe, wholesale, that that's just how it was. 

Only people like me don't, not in that kind of simplistic form. Without going into full evangelical rant, for it's bedtime, I'm just going to leave this here: for people like me, the music, the liturgy, the pure voices of a good choir, the darkness, the candles, the incense if I'm lucky - all these are what I'd term "aids to worship" - and worship in all its glory is a powerful aid. But it's not everything, any more than an ice-axe is a mountain. Sometimes hilarity is a big part of it - like yesterday morning's crèche-assembling. And the real stuff isn't confined to this season, and sometimes at Christmas I'm too tired to connect with it. But it's there, in the background, always. 

And I think I'm very fortunate.