A change from the gloom

As my title suggests, I succeeded in avoiding gloom - other than political - for most of today. Realising that the weather forecast suggested some sunshine, I had it worked out before breakfast, with the result that breakfast segued into coffee and then we were off - out to Benmore Gardens again to spend an hour climbing the hill, inspecting yet another wood fire - just coming to life, this one, with fragrant smoke and crackling red beneath the heap of wood - and once again meeting the hillside robin in the expected place. There was a deep pink rhododendron in bloom, and mist swirled in Glen Massan - it actually forms the backdrop for this photo, where there should be hills. 

Home for a spot of lunch, then out again to meet the other cantor at the church for a quick rehearsal for midnight mass. Then Himself practised while I set about creating the crèche in the space under the altar. One of the chaps who look after the fabric and altar furniture had dug out the big plastic box of figures wrapped in bubble wrap for me, and found the backdrops, including the dark starry night one - what could possibly go wrong?

At first it didn't. Grovelling on my knees in front of the altar, I managed to velcro the backdrop onto the frame that sits deep inside the space, and to fit what might be a proscenium curtain in a grander setting. I found the donkey and the cow (a very heavy couple, because they're on the one base), the kneeling Mary, the crib, the bambino, the kneeling shepherd and the boy whose hand is in danger of falling off. But where was Joseph? and where the older shepherd? They're the two standing figures needed to balance the scene, and they were nowhere to be found. I feared they might have been purloined for Easter - but Easter wasn't celebrated in church last year, and I've just realised that means they're properly missing in the damp hell of the tower. Panic.

A phone call to the helpful crucifer, at that time stranded in Morrison's car park awaiting his women, assured me of help in the morning, so I marched off to the graveyard to pick some more dead grasses for the stable floor. I met a woman walking round the side of the church in the gloaming - she'd been standing among the old graves round the back listening to the organ music and feeling Christmassy, she said. 

By now I'd done all I could and it was almost dark. We took a card round to our friends along the lane before we went home - another twenty minutes standing at their door chatting for the first time in months left us all laughing, slightly hysterically. Then Italian strugglings, and dinner. 

And the reflection, as I put up the Christmas cards that arrived today, that the current situation makes these tangible greetings all the more welcome. It also makes me more glad than ever to have the church in which we spend so much time just now - not just because people seem to value what we do there, but also because the lack of secular celebrations makes us - and I think other people too - focus more on what started all this in the first place. Maybe I just feel that the church experience is what makes everything else that bit more bearable. 

In other news, all family parcels have now arrived where they're meant to be, including in our hall, and our Advent Song has been recorded by a group of opera singers in a church in Washington - I heard it this evening. Quite exciting, that. 

Blipping the view across the river Eachaig over the fields towards the misty Glen Massan.