My wife decided to use Mary Berry's recipe for our Christmas pudding this year and it tasted lovely. The one thing about it was that it lack a bit of stodginess or whatever the nice word for that phenomenon is (weighty?). I missed that. Because it was also the Lord's Day the sermons yesterday did have those weightier (or whatever) elements that I often miss out on a Christmas Day when it falls on a week day (definitions of providence, material on the importance of preaching, etc. We were looking at two seasonal verses from Matthew 2 - verses 2 and 11. Both sermons were on the wisemen then and although that meant some overlap the two messages were different enough.
We had quite a sizeable congregation in the morning (50 or so) made up of regulars, members of their family, returning students, one or two visitors new or rare. Our oldest member who rarely makes it was there I'm glad to report (he also accidentally hit his emergency button around midnight of the same day so I saw him again later!). We had people from Nigeria, The Philippines, Iran and Eastern Europe as well as less exotic types. I spoke to the children using the good old candy cane. People were slow to leave both services. In the morning someone had arranged tea and Christmas nibbles and brought it through to us rather than waiting for people to go into the parlour. That was appreciated. At the end of the morning service someone came asking for money. He claimed to have been beaten up recently and had some evidence pointing that way. It is not my normal policy to give cash to people but sometimes it's just easier and it was Christmas Day after all.
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