Late last night I started working on my own e-greeting Christmas card to send out with out annual round robin letter, when a newsy email arrived with a photo of a Nativity scene which caught my attention and ended up being used to complete the greeting.
The email was from Sally Jumble Jackson, the dynamo behind the Cardiff Nativity story initiative, a pageant put on by a group of volunteers she recruited. It started the year I retired. St John's City Parish Church was asked to host an event in which children from schools around the city would visit the church to see this happening with an all adult cast of presenters dressed in traditional biblical garb throughout Advent. A hugely ambitious and seemingly impossible project to realise, but not one which St John's could make space for given the demands made to use the church for institutional carol services and charity concerts in December.
Fortunately Tabernacl Baptist church just down the street on the Hayes was able to offer hospitality, and each year for the past decade it has been a huge success, drawing thousands of children and catalysing similar events in churches across the region. This year it's not been possible for a repeat performance to take place, but with a wonderful spark of imagination, a half life size puppet show version has been staged and toured around schools, at times when covid safety restrictions have been imposed. It's an inspired piece of creative thinking, and very much a grass roots creative initiative by Christian lay folk.
Sally's motivation at the outset arose from realising how little the bible is taught in schools today, and how ignorant of the Christmas story the majority of children not raised in Christian families are, even if the schools put on a Nativity Play, which few do anyway, giving multicultural secularity as an excuse for tackling something 'too hard' to achieve in a pressured curriculum, even at Primary level.
It's been a grey damp day. I've started on putting together the Christmas cards and letters for posting and I still have to make a start on sending the digital equivalents, but no progress has been made today. I had a funeral this morning at St John's, my first in church during the covid era. The distancing arrangements work well there as the seating is flexible. Though I asked people to leave by the west door and not follow the coffin out of the north door, the congregation was on auto-pilot and did what they habitually do. I had to drive the car to church first and then up to Western Cemetery for the burial.
Being a bit nervous about this and wanting to be at church early, I walked out of the house with neither of my phones and without a face mask. Fortunately one of the funeral directors had a couple of spares in his car, which saved having to send out the a nearby shop to get one. And all this because it was raining. It meant I had to revert to wearing a raincoat from wearing my old ski jacket (oddly it was also six degrees warmer than yesterday) and my masks were in the coat I was wearing yesterday, not the raincoat. I was rather annoyed with myself, but pleased, given how little driving I have done in the past year, at how comfortable it is to sit in the car without a support cushion these days than it has been at any time in the past two years. That's progress.
It rained in the cemetery, and I was loaned a big golf style umbrella in purple with Pidgeon's the funeral directors name running around the rim. Stylish colour to go with an alb! One of the cemetery attendants told me was on holiday in Benidorm when the estadio de alarma was pronounced. The tour company did well to rearrange home flights pronto, his tour group's main hassle was getting a coach willing to take them to Alicante airport with roadblocks in place, and at that early stage lots of enforcement action on the autovia. I guess right at the start, permits paperwork and an inspection regime were only just being introduced, enough to make any commercial driver nervous indeed. But they got home OK, and he came back to his sad job of course, as a key public sector worker.
By the time I had lunch the rain stopped, for long enough to allow me to complete my afternoon walk in the park before it started again. After supper I spent a couple of hours weeding out redundant emails to increase my Google free space available, rather than pay for more storage. Then I watched the second in the 'Nordic Murders' series before writing this and turning in for the night.
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