Happy Christmas, Happy Anniversary

There's a Christmas Blessing of the Seas ceremony in Greek fishing ports where you throw a floral wreath into the sea, throw a small boy in to retrieve it, and bless boy, wreath, the sea and the fishermen. That secures safe fishing for the next year.

The Greek Orthodox church uses the Julian calendar, so Christmas falls on 7th January. And that day in 1998 Mrs F (Town Mayor at the time) and I (Mayoress, obviously) drove over to Margate to join Archbishop Gregorios, and all the other Cinque Ports Mayors.

So there we were on the beach, with large numbers of UK based Greeks and Greek Cypriots. To our right a soggy small boy and wet wreath, the Archbishop and fellow priests, performing the service through enormous tannoys, and the menfolk. To our left a great crowd of black-clad ladies talking about life and the grandchildren, and paying no attention to the service at all.

As we left the beach, the Archbishop boffed each of us over the head with a giant bunch of fresh, fragrant herbs. Over lunch the local MP made a flaming speech about the British army driving the Turks out of northern Cyprus in 1998,  applauded wildly and believed for a second by nobody.

At the end the Archbishop gave us this icon. So Happy Orthodox Christmas to you and Happy Anniversary to the icon.