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But when the time had fully come, God sent His Son…… (Galatians 4:4) Have you ever used one of those old-fashioned glass ‘egg-timers’?  Thousands of sand grains sink down from the wide top of the glass until they trickle through the tapered centre, only to fill the bottom as the glass widens out once more....

200 years ago this Christmas Eve a parish priest near Salzburg in Austria and his organist wrote a new carol for the midnight mass. The priest, Fr Joseph Mohr, provided the words in a poem he had recently written. The organist was Franz Xavier Gruber who created a tune of haunting beauty. The carol, Stille...

With Christmas coming, and with it the annual ‘celebration’ of family happiness and parties and get-togethers, many of our young people will be feeling even more lonely than ever.  And that is very lonely indeed. A recent survey has found that 16 to 24-year-olds experience loneliness more often than any other age group.  Two in...

Most of us probably know that on December 26th (the Feast of Stephen) ‘Good king Wenceslas’ looked out, writes David Winter. We probably also know that the snow lay round about, ‘deep and crisp and even’. Beyond that, he’s just someone in a carol that’s not often sung nowadays. However, Wenceslas was a real person,...

by Shaadia Firoz, Authentic, £9.99 Russian born Shaadia Firoz grew up in a Muslim family, afraid of her drunken and abusive father. Finding fame as a singer did little to fill her sense of emptiness, and a desperate search to fill this longing had her looking for love in all the wrong places. But everything...

What are you doing at present?  Losing weight to be ready for Christmas celebrations, or planning that diet for early New Year?  Either way, bear in mind that crash diets are NOT a good idea.  And now a recent study has found that heart attacks and strokes are more common among people who shed and...

Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol was first published 175 years ago, on 19th December 1843, at a time when the author was hard-pressed financially but appeared inspired by his themes of redemption and poverty. The first edition sold out by Christmas Eve, and by the end of the next year 13 editions had been...

We think of the traditional British Christmas as a few days off work, a family get-together and a big meal. In fact, that only goes back to Victorian times. Before that it was a religious event, with church services and carols, but not a great community event. Among important influences on the change was a...

The death of a very young child is perhaps the hardest grief of all to bear.  So the 28th December is a very poignant day in the church calendar.  It is when the worldwide Church joins with bereaved parents to grieve the loss of babies and young children.  For Holy Innocents day recalls the massacre...

Beatrix Potter, the children’s writer and illustrator, died of pneumonia in Cumbria 75 years ago, on 22nd December 1943. Born in 1866 in Kensington to a well-off family, she had limited higher education but schooled herself to the extent that she could be described as a natural scientist, particularly in the study of fungi. She...

In January we began this course exploring signs and symbols with the Cross: a sign of death, but also a sign of victory. We end the year with a sign that proclaims birth and new life: the crib of Christmas. In December cribs will be set up in churches, homes, villages and town centres. It...

Do you listen to podcasts?  Then you are right ‘on trend’, because nearly six million adults in Britain are now listening to the audio format each week, according to Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator.  That is nearly double the number recorded five years ago. What’s most popular?  That Peter Crouch Podcast, produced by the BBC, where...