Wednesday 30 December 2015

Rooms with a View of Christmas


New Years Eve eve, on our way to our daughter's place by train we passed over the Geffrye Museum. I was reminded of when we visited when she was little and enjoying the seasonal decoration of the period rooms and wondered if I'd see them this Christmas. After our visit we were on our way with our daughter to find somewhere to eat and to my delight found ourselves passing by the Geffrye Museum and taking a trip down memory lane.

It was a lovely journey through 400 years of  Christmases traditions. From the simplicity of boughs of holly and ivy to the more modern Christmas fayre and decorations.

We all have our Christmas traditions, whether it is Midnight Mass, the Christmas Stocking, the Turkey or the Christmas Tree we are doing what we have done for hundreds of years - celebrating, sharing, feasting and with love spreading light, hope and joy. Does how we do it really matter?

In the ever commercialisation of Christmas it is lovely to be reminded of more simple times and what we really value most, like a family trip down memory lane at Christmas.

As told in Dickens' tale 'A Christmas Carol' we can get good from the festivities of Christmas wiithout seeking profit from them and at the same time it can cost us nothing. The simplest pleasures can be derived from the simplest of pastimes and things like love, good will and the joys of Christmas cost nothing to spread. As the song goes 'The best things in life are free'!

Scrooge's nephew tells him:

'There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say ...Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round - apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that - as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good.'

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