Dear God, Please help me to keep it together this Christmas. For it is a testing time as well as a joyful one.

Help me to make sense of this season, in which the wonderful story of the birth of your Son jostles with all sorts of ghastliness. Give me the calm fortitude to bear the advertising, the tinsel, the pressure to be a perfect family, meaning a self-satisfied bourgeois bunch, worshipping at the shrine of their miserable materialism.