"With all the materialistic pressures involved in Christmas today we can easily think of it as a period of hectic preparation, a day of celebration and a brief aftermath. We can forget it is more than a feast. It is a season. And like all seasons its essence is a cycle of preparation, achievement, and then incorporation of what has been achieved into the larger season of which it is a part, the season of our life …
Our period of preparation for celebrating the mystery is itself a joyful time, because there is a quietly deepening understanding of whose birth it is we celebrate and just how eternal an event is involved.
Each year, it seems to me, the mystery of this birth becomes greater, yet the greater it grows, the closer it seems to come to us.
In a society that has lost so much of its capacity for peace and so much of the peacefulness required to prepare quietly for anything, we run the risk of being left only with the worship of the instantly visible, the immediately possessed, of being finally left only with the dryness of the instantly forgotten."
John Main