How did it get to be the Sunday before Christmas?  The year is disappearing again! 
I have braved the snow to visit my sister and her family so this morning I attended worship in a small Methodist, village church quite unlike my "normal" church experience.  There I watched the Sunday School act out the story of the birth of Christ with reference to a chicken, a cat, an owl (but fortunately no second lobster!) and Michael Mouse, who learnt the important lesson that the best and only gift we can give to God is our whole self.  It is not quite the account of Jesus's birth that we find in Luke's gospel but it still has the power to move the congregation to tears and to speak deeply of a God who would give up majesty and power to become a helpless, vulnerable human child.