As yet another longest night comes and goes, another Christmas Day passes and another year draws to a close, it seems it is progressively easier each year to discount the glittering lights, the endless partying and the rampant commercialism of the Christmas season and to concentrate instead on the real meaning of the Christmas event.

For me of course it’s to do with the world-transforming event a long time ago in Bethlehem when Christ was born in a manger, and on a silent holy night – while shepherds watched their flocks and the herald angels sang – God became one of us.

But for me also this Christmas once again there has been a profound awareness of the unmerited privilege of living amongst the peace and prosperity of the UK in 2009 when the vast majority of our fellow residents on the globe live in poverty and in war-zones, with famine and without basic essentials, under brutal dictatorships and suffering persecution. There’s a lot wrong with cynical, selfish Britain including our own share of poverty, loneliness and hopelessness, but North Korea, Sudan, Haiti, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe this isn’t.

And just as Christianity provided the necessary spiritual, moral and ethical soil for the flowering of the UK’s (and Europe’s) past vibrancy, creativity and organisational ability that led in turn to our present affluence, so – as even atheist Matthew Parris noted last Christmas (here) – Africa (and by extension every other poverty-stricken and corrupt nation) needs Christ. Such countries – and I would argue all countries – need Him now, they need Him for the long term and they need Him in a big way.

However, that’s not the point of this post. Rather it’s an appeal for a dose of public gratitude for our privileges that could renew our political life and move us on from the present cynical culture of asserting rights and claiming victimhood. Thankfulness towards an ‘other’ would shift our collective attention away from the small-minded self-centredness that cripples us and onto that ‘other’ – onto God if you are religious, or perhaps onto previous generations who gave and sacrificed and provided the basis of our present privileged circumstances if you’re not. Either way, gratitude for what we have been given by the ‘other’ would lift our eyes from ourselves to a more optimistic vision of a more generous future, as gratitude leads in turn to giving.

Maybe we ought to introduce an annual North American-style National Day of Thanksgiving. Held in Canada on the second Monday of October and in the US on the fourth Thursday of November, this holiday was originally religious in nature, to express thanks to God for the harvest. It has since become secular holiday when families get together for Thanksgiving dinner with turkey – a sort of additional secular Christmas but without the commercialism – but there is still an underlying tone of gratitude and generosity.

After all, anything that lifts the UK from its long-term pit of pessimism, suspicion and cynicism would be helpful.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year!

All was still and dark and, illuminated by the street lamps, a thick white frost lay on the cars in the road outside. Inside the house was quiet, the family in bed.

It was 5.30am and I crept downstairs for my early morning devotions. I had been increasingly burdened by the human tragedies that are filling our newspapers and TV screens. Mass murder and rape and the avoidable cholera outbreak of epidemic proportions amongst the grinding poverty of DR Congo and Zimbabwe; rocketing unemployment and home repossessions in the UK together with a series of individual tales of sickening human brutality such as the Baby P and ‘British Fritzl’ cases – wherever you look there seems to be unspeakable cruelty and unrelieved gloom.

I inserted Aled Jones’ The Christmas Album into the CD player and the hushed, almost haunting sound of his lone tenor voice gently filled the room. He sang the French carol ‘O Holy Night’ and a peace warmed my heart. ‘Long lay the world in sin and error pining, til He appeared and the soul felt its worth. O Holy Night… it is the night of the dear Saviour’s birth.’

The world was created a beautiful place, yet through sin and error, selfishness, greed and violence, humankind is destroying the environment and killing the people.

Yet there is hope, and it’s got nothing to do with financial bailouts, humanitarian aid programmes, a possible Copenhagen climate change deal or urgent United Nations resolutions about central and southern Africa.

It’s got everything to do with the Christ-child whose virgin birth we celebrate on 25th December. God hasn’t gone absent or given up on us despite our own best efforts to destroy ourselves and His creation. Instead through His Son He entered the world and became part of His own creation in order to rescue us from our own folly, stupidity and worse.

There in the Christ-child lies hope, real hope. In Jesus’ life, death and subsequent resurrection lies the real rescue plan that makes Gordon Brown’s well-intentioned efforts to “save the world” (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5319124.ece) through jaw-dropping amounts of government borrowing look a little inadequate.

This Christmas we’ve got an opportunity to raise our eyes from the frailty and fragility of the Prime Minister’s plans – and even from the forthcoming Presidential inauguration of the latest political messiah Barak Obama – and look to Someone who is infinitely more reliable and competent at the rescue business.

Happy Christ-mas!