A Very Merry British Christmas

Different:
1. Lots of people say "Happy Christmas" instead of "Merry Christmas."
2. No Christmas cookies! Christmas cake and Christmas mince pies instead.
3. Not so many houses decorate on the outside for Christmas, but the city went light-crazy with about 15 miles of lights (which they started putting up in October)!
4. Boxing Day (day after Christmas). Reminds me of a sort of British substitute for the day after Thanksgiving.
5. German Christmas Markets, full of good things to eat, smell, and buy!
6. People freely and happily say "Merry Christmas" to each other, even to people they don't really know. I don't sense any of the paranoid PCishness we have in the States with wondering if you should say "Merry Christmas," "Happy Holidays," or just mind your own business. But this all seems funny to me because it seems much more international here.
7. No bell-ringing outside Wal-Mart for the Salvation Army here. They go out into town with a full brass ensemble.

Same!
1. Hearing Christmas carols playing in the stores and knowing that people actually know what it means (unlike Japan).
2. We're off to Christmas Eve service at church tonight.
3. Lots of good food. And plenty of slothing around.
4. Snow! (cross fingers, anyway)
5. Christmas trees. We didn't have many Christmas ornaments, so we improvised and used all of the keitai (cell phone) characters we amassed in Japan. Our tree is very uniquely decorated with the like of Hello Kitty and a goya-holding shisa, and is even topped-off with a ninja star.
6. We're very proud of the huge display of Christmas cards and letters that we received from our friends and family from all over the world.
7. At the root of it, Christmas is still Christmas, no matter how or where you celebrate it. It's easy to think Christmas is all of the fuss that we make it out to be, but really, it's as simple as sharing love with other people and remembering the amazing gift of love that God gave us over 2000 years ago. (Cheesy, I know, but true!)

A very Merry Christmas, Happy Christmas, Meri Kurisumasu, Feliz Navidad, etc. to you over there from us over here!

Kristy

Postcard from the Front Lines

We saw the Narnia movie last night, which, besides being an excellent allegory of the Gospel, is also an interesting window into the world behind our world. The idea that just because you don't see something, doesn't mean it isn't there. A powerful example of this is the spiritual state of war that we exist within, a frightening picture of the potential invisible gravity of the consequences of our actions and the use (or misuse) of our gifts. Do we unknowingly stand in the midst of a raging battle? If so, who are we fighting for? Or are we standing there denying a war is on at all?

I have recently been blessed with a window into the war in two forms. The first is through my involvement with the Leeds Asylum Seekers Support Network, and the second is in my new job as a debt counsellor with the Consumer Credit Counselling Service. I have always been aware that asylum seekers and people in debt exist, but it has never been more than that - a mere awareness. Until now, I have never sought them out, thought about what I could do to help, or really understood the immensity of their suffering.

Asylum seekers in the U.K. face a horrific trial in that the government and much of the population are so worried that the system could be used as a vehicle for terrorists (despite the fact that it would be much safer for a terrorist to get a fake passport and pose as a tourist than to run the administrative gauntlet as an asylum seeker) that they have constructed an absolutely inhumane system as a deterrant. There is no proof that the system has ever been abused to the extent that would justify this inhumanity, but fear drives a legislative hammer onto its ever-hardening blade. Asylum seekers flee here to escape torture, murder, rape and circumstances we could never imagine, and instead of compassion and assistance, they face mistrust, destitution and discrimination. The people we should be fighting for are the people we end up fighting against for no reason other than unfounded prejudice.

The issue of debt, which may seem comparitively trivial at first glance, is in fact another largely unseen major battlefront. The number of people crushed under staggering debt is increasing dramatically every year. Most of them are not in debt because of bad planning or a lack of knowledge, but simply due to changes in circumstances they were unable to forsee. Loss of income due to sickness or the death of a partner, redundancy, divorce. It is so easy to get credit to survive that it spirals out of control before they realise it, and suddenly they are in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, often facing a defecit just trying to balance essential costs like food and rent, and unable to pay anything to their creditors. Can you imagine what it would be like to look at the future and only see debt that you could never hope to repay? To starve yourself trying to pay it off? Losing your home, your family, your friends?

People in these situations are all around us. We probably see hundreds of them every week and don't even realise it. It's not like everybody has to do something about it, but if you recognise a war is going on and you decide you have a responsibility to fight then you have to enlist, and this is where it seems I've been posted. I'll let you know how I get on.

Ian

Kristy's First Trip to London!

Ahem, attention everybody… Kristy would now like to tell you about her exciting first trip to London! Everybody listen up! Beuller! Ok. This past Wednesday we went to London (my very first time!) London has been one of those places I never really dreamed I’d see for myself. It has that behind-the-television-screen-type awe to it… and I got to see that it all really does exist in real life! Good to know it all isn’t some Truman Show-type conspiracy by the government or anything like that.

And what is better than a trip to London? A trip to London for free! We got to ride down in style on a pair of first class train tickets that a friend gave us all for the low, low price of nothing! (Evidently, he gets loads of free tickets from the amount that he travels down for business. Thanks, Mark!) We started out by having some train troubles, though, and had to be re-routed, so it was about 3:30 before we rolled into St. Pancras Station. No problem. We were still ready to have a killer time (as they say in Napolean Dynamite).

We decided to take a walk past St. Paul’s Cathedral on our way across the mighty Thames. Unfortunately, they were doing construction on most of the outside, so all we got to see was the covering paper, which, funnily enough, was covered with a dot-matrix-type printout of what the exterior was supposed to look like. If you got far enough away, you might actually be able to fake to yourself that you were looking at the real and actual St. Paul’s Cathedral in all its glory.

After trotting across the Millennium Bridge and snapping a few photos, (unfortunately, since it gets dark here by 4pm, all of our pictures can collectively be called, “London at Night”) we headed on to the Tate Gallery of Modern Art to stroke our chins at some Andy Worhol and pictures of naked people. After that, it was into town for some exploring.

It is so cool when you can go to a place and find things you didn’t expect. We wandered down one of these alleyways to find a huge plaza decked with Christmas lights and a huge Christmas tree sided up to an ice-skating rink. Very Dickens-esk! Later, while walking through the government district near Big Ben, we saw this royal soldier guy with a saber opening a gate for an official-looking car. We got our value as tourists! Ian describes him as having a coat like the Spanish inquisition with a huge crazy red hat with tassels. He even did the walk - like he was stepping over huge puddles. Later, when he was standing guard, we wondered if he was one of those guards that aren’t allowed to talk, itch, or blink, and what he would do if we tickled him.

We had a match between Starbucks and McDonalds while we walked to Trafalgar Square. Unsurprisingly, Starbucks won with about eight sightings while McDonalds lagged behind with only four (it’s a new era, isn’t it?). After paying tribute to Big Ben and Westminster Abby (which was creepy looking in the dark – “Just as a good church should,” quoth Ian), we jaunted up to Soho, where they have Broadway shows advertised on every corner. Hopefully we can get down again to see one sometime. For dinner, we stopped at a little Japanese place creatively called “Little Tokyo” for some curry udon and donburi. Our last stop was Piccadilly Circus; then we were back on the tube to the station, and then home again. What a great day!