“My plan this Christmas Day is to get up early, jump into the cold English sea, meditate and then go to church. By the time I get home the household will be awake. After opening presents we will have lunch and there will be conversations, agreeable and disagreeable. Later, we’ll walk on the beach, and when we return to the house there will be more eating and drinking and laughter and conversation, which, no doubt, will be considerably less agreeable.
“And somewhere, amid the feasting and joyful human messiness – this beautiful, this happy, this sorrowful estate – I will acknowledge how extraordinarily fortunate my family and I are to have this good Christmas Day. I will remember, too, amongst all the making and the doing, the energising principle around which this day revolves that speaks so eloquently of rebirth and renewal, and the end to waiting – that of a mother bearing a child in a stable, revitalising the world for all eternity.
I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy and peaceful New Year.”
– Musician Nick Cave