Its the first day of the new year! Let’s hope it is truly a good one for all of us. Soon we’ll be taking down the decorations and getting ready to engage with the work of the coming year. In fact we’ve made a start already. The  Christmon tree has been removed from the church, well not quite?  I cut all the branches off of it and its now standing in the chancel a rather despised and forlorn tree. It’s been turned into our Lenten cross. I’ll leave it up this Sunday to let the children see it and help them make the connection with Easter. (Although that point has been made very well in my last post by the church puppeteers.) If we’re removing the decorations I’ll also have to remove the Christmas picture of the manse from the blog.

Many of you have actually remarked on the picture and also on the manse. Yes we do like living in this old house. Its been a manse since 1857 and I believe it cost something like £350 to build. Not bad value for money. I just wonder how many of our kit framed house will be standing in another 150 years. Any living in such an old house also adds a bit of character to Christmas. So before the decorations and the picture changes I thought I’d share with you some of the Christmas images we have place around our home this year. Have a look in the Christmas Album that I’ve created

One more little addition I’m going to try this year to share a track from a favourite album with you and also hopefully stimulate you to perhaps go and but the track yourself. Well today i was listening to Tom Morton on the radio and he reminded me of a fantastic song that I had forgotten about, its called “Sweet Thing” by Van the Man. Tom mentioned how joyful the track is and it is. It just a great way to start off the new year. I’m going to post this now before the clock changes to midnight.