Naomi

IT’S CHRISTTTTTMAAASSSSSSSS!!! You were just introduced to the Christmas song OF YOUR LIFE. That’s how we Midlanders* do it! Let’s forget for a moment that Slade are from Wolverhampton, my football (soccer) team’s enemy…

ANYWAY. I love Christmas. I am sitting by the Christmas tree right now, reminiscing about Christmases past. One of my traditions was always to search the house on Christmas Eve to see where Mum had hidden my presents. (Actually, right now, Mum, as you are reading this, I am upstairs unwrapping all my presents!!!)

I also love all of the Christmas songs that are dragged out each winter and that we surprisingly never get sick of, because we only have to hear them once a year. These are MELODIES FROM HEAVEN, played on Jesus’s special synthesizer. They are a gift to the innocent young children of the world. I unashamedly love and sing along to EVERY Christmas song I hear pumped out on TV and in tinselled shops.

Christmas is probably my dad’s busiest time. I just asked him for a quote about Christmas from a real-live priest, and he said: “Christmas turns the world upside down.” There is your sermon for the day. Love and peace, guys! My dad’s church is super beautiful and welcoming at this time of year, with a huge tree and lots of carols (my favourite is “In the Bleak Midwinter”), and baby Jesus in a manger surrounded by plastic animals.

But what I love most about Christmas is the time. It always goes by in a blink, but I try my absolute hardest to relish the immense number of films on TV and the dark afternoons that let you curl up and read a book with a clean conscience, and of course the Christmas tree and all the decorations that just make life seem less empty. This is how I feel now, as a teenager. I am sure as I grow older Christmas will take on various moods and meanings and some will be loving and some will be lonely and others will be full of firsts, and I honestly can’t wait for every single one.

Christmas pats you on the back and says, “Well done for this year.” And you know for certain it will only be another year till it’s back again. ♦

* The Midlands is the middle part of England, where I live, and where Slade is from.