Christmas is Chocolate, Carolling, Friends and Paris?

It's that time of the year again when dispatches arrive bearing unwieldy hampers and assorted gifts from clients, and your secretaries force-feed you all sorts of confections containing either a disproportionate chocolate cream and chocolate sponge ratio or a sickly sweet amount of candied cherries, mixed fruits and nuts. It all gets a bit messy when you're conducting rather heated negotiations on a conference call and the secretaries are peeping in and attempting to tell you that they're giving you another slice a branded festive corporate edible that doesn't contain any brandy.

Christmas, someone said, is about chocolates. And there were boxes. Literally, boxes. And there were mounds of truffles from the very pink and very rococo Prestat, to Leonidas the ironically melty King of Sparta, to Godiva indecently-unattired on a horse (history does not record if it was attired).

Or perhaps, sighed another, Christmas is about carolling (and having your carolling scores jam up the office printer).
Christmas, yet again, could be good food, good wine, good company, great friends and exciting new plans to spread the good news, hosted by the newly-opened PS Café, twinkling amongst the peaceful greenery of Dempsey.
Later, someone else said, Christmas is about Paris and flew from London to the Capital of Love on a Cirrus SR22. And the land-bound nibbled macarons and watched C'était un Rendez-vous with cracking hearts.

Because, suddenly, we knew a café the madman sped past, breakneckedly, on his way to his cheesy rendezvous. That café on Montmatre, a stone's throw from the Sacre Couér. From the murky depths of our minds rose the spectre of a long-forgotten day, years and years ago, when we sat outside with the smell of summer, cupping hot chocolates, watching the Parisian dusk fall, the world open to us like a beautiful oyster (all in keeping with the cheesiness of C'était un Rendez-vous). Flushed with the idealism and excitement of youth, we explored with words the pathways ahead of us: Juilliard, Peabody, Eastman; UN, ILO, UNHCR, Red Cross; Ivy League B-schools, Mercer, McKinsey; Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Duke, Médecins Sans Frontières, Nobels; New York, Broadway, Playbill...

Perhaps, he said, perhaps not all of us turn out like we thought we would.

Thank God! I said. Or we would never be saved.

You did not wait for me
To draw near to You
But You clothed Yourself
With frail humanity

You did not wait for me
To cry out to You
But You let me hear
Your voice calling me

And I'm forever grateful to You
I'm forever grateful
For the cross
I'm forever grateful to You
That You came
To seek and save the lost

I'm Forever Grateful, Mark Altrogge
© 1985 People Of Destiny International (Admin. by Sovereign Grace Ministries)

Christmas is about God graciously taking the initiative.

In other news, Christians at Christmas is where the money is.