For us and our children, Christmas is complicated. It stirs up deep emotions about family and past traumas, about love and pain. For our children, these deep, complicated emotions tend to show themselves as huge behaviours, which seem at odds with the supposed sweetness of the season. For my husband and I, it adds an extra layer of planning, pre-empting and general effort, to an already busy, demanding time. Our patience, self restraint and capacity for giving and joy are stretched to our limits. Our house becomes messier. Our energy levels, all round, are pretty low.

So we simply can’t do the picture-perfect Christmas our culture tells us to strive towards. We simply can’t.

But I think that perhaps this is OK. Christmas is about the kind of love that shows itself in a weary couple, who’ve already been through an unexpected pregnancy and a long journey, who arrive in a small town, with nowhere to stay, as night us drawing in, who end up in a stable, about to give birth. It’s about a few shepherds, normally the last to be included, but who turn up still dressed in field clothes and smelling of animals, to celebrate something good.

Christmas is about simply being present, as we are, raw and tired and vulnerable, weathering the difficulties of the season as they come, and receiving its blessings with open hands too.

It’s about love, and yeah, perhaps love can show itself in beautifully wrapped gifts and exquisite food. But love can also show itself in still being there on the other side of an outburst, in choosing play over the perfection of a tidy house, in listening painstakingly to the outpouring of a hurting heart, despite the pain it causes oneself to hear those words. Love can show itself in apologising, in picking up another’s mess again, in adapting expectations according to another’s needs. Love can show itself in sharing junk food in a car, or being awake at the crack of dawn, or sitting quietly at the end of the day.

Love can show itself in big families or small ones, fractured ones, the families we make and the families we didn’t choose.

Love can show itself in the midst of mess, in the humblest of people, in spite of all our flaws and pain.

And I think that’s what God wanted us to know when he sent his Son in a messy, human birth, in a pained, unjust world. I think he wanted ys to know that whatever we think we do or don’t have to offer, he comes to us anyway, loves us anyway.

We may have a bundle of hay or a badly sung song or a tender gesture or gold or frankincense – or nothing at all but our own hurting heart – and still he comes. Still he loves.

So, whatever your Christmas looks like, I pray you’d find moments to know yourself loved as you are, to know yourself not alone in your pain and questions, and to know joy, too, in spite of mess ir chaos or imperfection.

Happy Christmas!