Christmas is fast approaching.

It is once more the time of short, dark days, warm glows and twinkly lights, hearty meals and inward pleasures. Like Clyde in Ghost Train, I have prepared the dark, rich foods of the heart of winter: mincemeat, fruit cake and a round splodge of a Christmas pudding. The first mince pies, a delight enhanced by their long absence, have been baked and eaten, I have rooted out my plastic apron with the holly pattern, and the artwork for this year’s Christmas cards is completed. Outside, the garden has been subdued by the touch of frost and snow. Through it all, I’m looking ahead to New Year 2025.

Reflections on the season.

The equinox seasons – autumn and spring – inspire work and energy, whilst the solstice ones – winter and summer – demand leisure and indulgence. There is no more welcome feeling I know than the anticipation of Christmas. There is no celebration that is, in our society, so widespread, and no better time than the shortest, darkest days to eat, drink and be merry with friends.

Our shopping streets, like Ridgeley’s in Ghost Train, may be scrappy remnants of what they once were, and our excitement may be a mere shadow of that felt in the innocence of a childhood in simpler times, but there remains something life-affirming about that small flame of enthusiasm that flickers into being inside us in December at the thought of the occasion to come. Just a few months ago, the thought of it all stirred nothing except a slightly weary remembrance of all the work involved, and yet now the small spring of seasonal delight is bubbling away. It is a kind of magic.

There is also the wonder of the stillness of Christmas morning. If you have excited children, visiting family, presents to open and dinner to cook you may find that fanciful, but all that energy and activity sits on top of the peace of a morning when more of us than at any other time have ceased our regular activities. If you have just the space of one breath to pause, you will feel that peace, the quiet as of a landscape muffled in fresh snow. It’s as if the Earth itself had stopped spinning before setting off in a new direction.

The things that survive into New Year 2025

I have no idea what this Christmas will bring to me or to the world. There are trials and suffering all around and I don’t know if more troubles or some relief are coming. But my question is, whatever is coming, what will you carry through it? What is so much a part of you that you will still feel or believe it whatever happens? As we pass through Christmas, the full stop of the year, what things about ourselves will still be with us for the start of 2025? The things that survive will be the things that form our identity, that make us who we are during our life on this planet.

If you’re interested in how ideas change over time, what we believe and then leave behind and how society changes as a result, you will enjoy my new novel Ghost Train, which is coming out on 13th December. There are also spooky happenings to be explained, some comedy and delicious food along the way, and of course mysterious trains. What could be better entertainment for this time of year?