Christmas
Christmas 2026 Readings Isaiah 52.7-10 Hebrews 1.1-4 Luke 2.1-20 A few years ago I was struck by an item in the news just before Christmas. It was a tongue in cheek article in the Business section of the daily paper reporting on one of the greatest brand competitions of recent times – Jesus vs. Santa Claus. Well, the surprising thing wasn’t actually that Santa is outselling Jesus by a factor of about a hundred - after all, it’s hard to beat the marketing strategy of a fat guy in a red suit who can persuade you to punish your credit card by pretending to fly around the whole world in a single night, giving everybody exactly what they want – the truly surprising thing about the article that seemed to utterly flabbergast the writer – was that Jesus seemed to be catching up. Fast. Nativity scenes still have a long way to go before they’re as popular as Santa’s grotto – but according to this economist, religion’s making a comeback at the checkout. So I started t...