One Christmas night, far from home, I was on a long Buddhist retreat filled with silence. We had all been sick with a flu that had gone round the monastery, and we had failed to keep order in our sittings, but we had mostly recovered so it was decided that we would sit all night just to bring us back together again. Somewhere in the early morning, I began to remember Christmases in our traditional home, when I was very young. I remembered the thrill of waking in the pitch black and finding a stocking at the bottom of my bed, with things in it I could not see, but could feel the shape of. And sneaking a light on, to open it and pull things out, and then falling asleep again, and then waking up again, and there would be a silvery light beginning, and I would get up quietly and go downstairs, and there was the great tree, hushed, silver grey in the reflected light from the snow outside, and under it, who knows what wonders. The house all blanketed in quiet.

A silver grey dawn was also on its way where I now was sitting. But I went back into the past again, and I remembered how I used to just sit in the silver shadow of the tree, and watch the morning coming, and I would shiver in the cold, and wrap my dressing gown around me, and wait. Just to sit in the glow of anticipation, and the beauty of the early morning. And I thought then that that was the best part of Christmas for me -- that feeling that the world is about to be made new again, that it was not the gifts themselves, but the gifts symbolized the possibility at every moment of something special coming into the world, a possibility we pay what homage we can to by buying things for others, and which provides the entry point for the parasitical commercialism that drags it all down into the usual crap.

But happily, I only thought about the bad side for a moment. I wrapped my robe around me, and shivered from the cold of an early morning room 20 years in the past. Dawn approached, and there was that feeling, the old quiet that I got caught by, and suddenly recaught again: the bluegrey light of beginning, the silver stillness of a world on the verge of awakening.

And then we got up and chanted the Heart Sutra in 6th century Chinese.....


Merry Christmas to all Mudcatters of all persuasions in the 10 directions....