An African Christmas

For us as a family, Christmas this year will be our first in a long time out of Africa. In November and December, the rains come to East and Central Africa and farmers are busy ploughing and planting for a harvest the following Easter. Christmas comes as a welcome pause in this cycle but it is a brief one. On the day itself there will be chicken stew and perhaps some biscuits to share. The next day people return to their fields to cultivate. Meanwhile the cow, the goat and the chickens (less one!) will need feed. That difference in lifestyle and expectation represents a huge contrast. It is more startling for us than the sheer temperature difference. Kenya enters its hottest day-time month in January yet can also experience some of its coldest nights as the upland air chills overnight to the verge of frost.
This year during Sundays in Advent we are opening a window upon the people of Angola. And over Christmas we at St James’s are inviting you to join Christian Aid’s Child of Africa appeal. Christmas is all about a hope that has come for the world in the life of a child. Children like Servina and Eduardo have hope today yet they often have to care for siblings and work the land rather than attend to their own education. I hope that you can be inspired by their stories of hope and join in the appeal.
Although this year we will miss that African Christmas there are many things we hold the same. I remember driving a pick-up packed to bursting with members of the Mothers’ Union singing carols with gusto as we swayed around precariously on hardened and rutted mud tracks. Most of the tunes were familiar even if the Bemba words were not. In Kenya we even enjoyed Christmas by candlelight – and not just because the electricity had failed again. The church was decorated with candles to celebrate the Saviour’s birth.
Faith, in other words, is universal, even if its expression varies from place to place. Now that place for us is St James’s, Dudley. And we look forward to celebrating the coming season with you as together we learn once more the hope we share. May you have a blessed and peaceful Christmas.

Fr Andrew