A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The penultimate post in a series of fifty-two.

On Christmas Day, I hope you’re finding peace and happiness in whatever you are up to, and whether or not you are celebrating.

One of work’s national leaders tied himself in such knots this week in his attempts to be religiously inclusive that he ended up robotically “wishing you all a wonderful set of end-of-year activities.”

No other Christmas greeting has ever made me laugh so hard and, while not his intention, perhaps that makes it the best greeting of all.

This week, I’ve been reading Heaven on Earth by Emma J Wells. In her section on the Notre-Dame de Paris fire of 2019, she talks about Father Jean-Marc Fournier running into the burning building to rescue

the Blessed Sacrament: the consecrated wine and host used in the Eucharistic ritual, which literally was, to Fournier, an act of saving Jesus himself from the flames.

How awesome his faith must be to risk his life for some bread and grape juice. And how fine the line between religion and madness.

Christmas is Alan Bennett’s diary in The LRB, but as it always appears in the New Year issue, this is (I think) the first year I’ve read it on Christmas Day. I enjoyed Richard’s Christmas morning walk, too.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image for the prompt ‘a robot in a Christmas scene, oil painting’ created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.