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What makes Christmas? What makes a perfect Christmas?

I know there are lots of reasons to think Christmas comes far too early, but when you are writing articles like this in the middle of November, it does really help that the adverts are all on already.

This year there are two very different, but particularly good ones, from opposite ends of the supermarket spectrum.

Waitrose have imagined a perfect Christmas romance, where shy beardy Joe Wilkinson meets superstar actress Keira Knightley at the cheese counter, and falls in love with her through the course of the Christmas season. All is lost when Joe finds a present in her house from a mysterious Mark, but after Joe declares his love with his Nan’s turkey pie, she reveals that Mark is her brother, and that she loves Joe too.

Tesco have gone the other way. A presumably right-wing Grandad has upset the family by “having an opinion”; a couple bicker over the way he is writing Christmas cards; two others sit awkwardly with a neighbour they have nothing in common with; a game of Pictionary descends into a full-on row about who Mum loves the most; a brother and sister can’t get on well enough just for one family Christmas photo. “Christmas isn’t perfect”, a voice says, “but that’s what makes it Christmas.”

Somewhere in the combination of these two very different stories is something like the true meaning of Christmas. On the one hand, we don’t live in a perfect world, and so we won’t have a perfect Christmas. People will argue, turkeys will be overcooked or undercooked or somehow both simultaneously, and someone will be ill. For all the very stylised pictures of the nativity story (my main complaint is how clean everything always is) the truth is that Jesus was born into the muck and mess and chaos of human family life, in the midst of an oppressive regime. Christmas has never been perfect.

Except it is. You and I aren’t perfect, and the world isn’t, but at the heart of Christmas is a love story like no other. It doesn’t start at a cheese counter – even a lovely Waitrose one – but at the moment before the creation of the world when God chose to make us out of a desire for love and relationship with us. And God wanted us so much, that despite us turning away from him, he sent his Son at Christmas. It is even more unlikely than the Waitrose advert, as God bridges a gap bigger still than the one between Joe and Keira, and all of humanity is embraced in the greatest romance there will ever be.

I hope you have a lovely Christmas, even if bits of it won’t be perfect. But most of all, I hope that this Christmas your attention might be caught by the great love story of the Son of God who came to be with you.