Anyone visiting Dubai, and I imagine those living there, know that Christmas is coming. There are Christmas decorations and decorated Christmas trees filling the hotels and shopping malls. In the lobby of the hotel where I was staying in Dubai there was a Christmas tree and Santa’s Grotto but when I walked passed it Santa was not at home.

A recording of Christmas Carols was being played as I entered the aeroplane on my flight from Dubai to Bangkok. Here in Bangkok the Christmas tree in the lobby of the Oriental Hotel is huge and beautifully decorated. In the small hotel where I am staying the staff in the restaurant the evening I arrived were wearing red white and green knitted hats with reindeer antlers coming out of them.

The carols are of the ‘I wish you a Merry Christmas’ and ‘I’m dreaming of a White Christmas’ variety and though I didn’t hear his praises being sung I am sure Rudolph the Red nose Reindeer was somewhere around in both countries.

Some find this ‘commercialisation’ or ‘secularisation’ of Christmas distressing. I do not. There is an atmosphere of joy and celebration in the air. Here the words ‘Happy Christmas’ are not avoided. Throughout all this some one may ask, ‘What is Christmas?’ And they may seek and find the answer. On top of each of those Christmas trees there is a star and someone may ask, ‘Why?’

My walks through Kennington Park have shown me that dogs are excellent conversation starters. It is made easy because the dogs are inclined, usually in affectionate terms, to engage with each other. Even when the encounter is not positive it enables the owners involved to begin a conversation and opens up a whole realm of human enrichment.

The same seems to apply to those with prams. Although the child in the pram does not engage they facilitate communication between the adults pushing the pram or buggy.

When I recently started using a walking stick I discovered that sticks offer the same possibilities. Making my slow journey through Kennings Way recently a stranger commented on the sturdy nature of my walking stick to which I was able to respond by admiring hers which was very elegant.

‘But of course it is,’ she said, ‘Because I am a lady!’  And she laughed.

We then went on to discuss mobility issues, the weather, and the merits and demerits of Southwark Council. A pleasant encounter from which we both benefitted – I most certainly did.

Conversation starters and conversation stoppers are hugely important. How sad it is when individuals, families, societies or nations stop speaking to one another. They are  left diminished and deprived.

When I compare myself with some of my family and friends I can see myself as poor. When I compare myself with friends, some here in London but certainly some in India and Thailand, I am very rich indeed. Comparisons can be very tricky and context is very important. Poverty in the United Kingdom or New Zealand can look quite different to that in India or Africa.

C S Lewis said that pride was the greatest sin of all. The opposite virtue is humility. During the Second World War, Lewis was invited by the BBC to broadcast a series of talks. The talks became the book Mere Christianity. He devoted a whole talk to ‘The Great Sin.’ Pride, he said, leads to every other vice and that is because it is basically comparative and competitive.

‘Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.’

It is the superior, ‘I’m not as bad as…’ and, ‘At least I am more generous than…’ or more polite, or kind or anything at all, wherein lies the problem. 

C S Lewis, ‘It is the comparison that makes you proud.’

When I was chaplain to my old school in Christchurch New Zealand we had School Assembly in the Hall on Thursday mornings. The whole school assembled. The Headmaster lead half the staff, gowned, down one aisle to the stage. The chaplain, cassocked, lead the other half. On the stage the chaplain and the headmaster faced each other, acknowledged each other with a head bow and turned to face the school. The chaplain said, ‘Sit,’ which everyone did, and then gave a brief ‘Thought for the day.’

One Thursday I spoke about the sin of pride when it is comparative and I quoted C S Lewis. Then I sat and the Headmaster stood to give his address to the school. He said,

‘The chaplain has spoken about the wrong sort of pride. I will speak to you about the right sort. There’s litter around the quad! And around upper! Anyone would think we were some local high school! Take some pride in the place!’

As we were processing out I heard the voice of a senior colleague behind me,

‘Chaplain, I think the headmaster missed your point!’

It s trikes me that the Christmas Spirit is alive and well in the United Kingdom given the increase in the number of advertisements in the media by charities asking for donations. Christmas is still seen as a time for giving. There are appeals for the homeless and refugees together with usual animal charities seeking support. All are appropriate. The holy family found ‘no room at the inn’ at Bethlehem and became refugees with their flight into Egypt, and ox and ass, cattle sheep and a donkey feature as well.

Contrasting Observances of Remembrance moved me equally.

First the great Festival packed with people broadcast from the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday evening. Then the thousands led by the King at the Cenotaph at Whitehall on Sunday and watched by millions on television.

The last was the simple act of remembrance on Monday. The Vicar of St Agnes took the initiative and in time for the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month went, with a few parishioners, to the War Memorial in Kennington Park.

Seeing a priest in a cassock and cloak at the War Memorial a handful of passers-by joined us. There was a pause, a silence, a commemoration, and prayers. We remembered them. Eleven of us.

The large numbers are important but it is not the numbers that count.