Christmas Thoughts in Advent -- Mari Howard
December Dawn... Some years ago, along with several other authors, I was invited to read a Christmas story on local radio. Any short story or an excerpt from a longer piece of fiction, as long as it was set at Christmas. I chose a few pages from The Labyrinth Year, book two of my family saga set in the mid-1990s, which describes my protagonists, a young couple, Jenny and Max, taking their five year old daughter Alice to her first Christmas carol service. It’s a super-middle-class story of warm feelings, bright candles, a lovely Tree, and excellent singing from the choir. Alice is spellbound by the Crib, and after staring a while, asks where the baby is? Mum Jenny recalls when she first met Max, in Cambridge at the end of term, and how he insisted on taking her to a carol service at his college. Max is reminded how his rather grim Dad, a Presbyterian Minister, would have disdained the ‘flummery’, as he saw it, of all this glittery nonsense in a church. So, what exactly is C...