Tonight our week-night reflections for Advent begin.  This year thinking about angels.  The format is the same each day - simple liturgy, Bible reading, picture, music, prayer... max fifteen minutes.  This is the fifth time I've done this (different themes) and it's always been well received by those who have taken part.  One of the better outcomes of the pandemic, maybe?

It's not that often that the start of Advent in church coincides with the commercial Advent on 1st December, but this year it does.

The Advent wreath at church is very beautiful, and has nice chunky candles that will last all through the four weeks, even with some midweek lighting along the way.

Advent and Christmas always get so hopelessly mixed up together, and this year is no exception with the start of the 'Angel Voices' reflections tomorrow - preceded by an angel craft session with the Rainbows and brownies - a Vicar School Carol Service and Christmas Dinner on Tuesday, and then a crazy run through with two or three things almost every single day until Christmas.

At the moment there is nothing scheduled for 14th December, a Saturday... I am planning to keep it that way if I possibly can.

I do love Advent-Christmas with all its crazy, heretical, frenetic, celebratory, stressy, delightful activity... so here we go again! (And at least it is only 24/25 days this year!)

I usually take off the last weekend before Advent begins, and I suspect by the time Boxing Day arrives this year, I will be wishing I had done because I will be so very, very tired.  For all that, yesterday was a good day, a very good day, with a toy service, which saw lots of new toys gathered for the Salvation Army to distribute, a big gathering of folk sharing a soup lunch, and many of us learning how to make wreaths - mine in the photo above.

Having been at church at 8 a.m. to start off the slow cooker and not leaving until nearly 3 p.m. after we had cleared up, it was a long day.  The days ahead are filling up rapidly, with all sorts of good things and, weather/trains permitting, a few work-related trips. 

Although I have to constantly remind myself I am now rapidly approaching 62 not 22, I do enjoy all the craziness of this time of year.

I was late to social media - I liked blogging, liked not knowing who was reading this stuff, unless they commented or made contact in other ways.  Eventually I gave in and joined Facebook and later Twitter.  Yesterday I was one of the millions joining Bluesky.

I have mostly enjoyed, and still enjoy, social media, but over time parts of it have changed dramatically and often not for the better.

I remain on the platform formerly known as Twitter, at least for now, since there are many good people and fun accounts still be found there.  But for how much longer if rumours about sales and control and other unpleasant changes prove to be true?  I ponder the tension between the truth that you can't change something from outside of it, and the truth that participation can become collusion.  Tricky.

And of course now there are so many other platforms that there just is not the time or space to be there.  My decision to join BlueSky (as myself and as my cats) with the same 'handles' as  on the other place seems to echo that of millions of others - so much so that some glitches have arisen in the new place.

For now, what's enjoyable is that the connections I/we have are few, and trusted, and it it take seconds to scroll through the posts.

Scarily, it's now nineteen years since I began blogging, and this once busy French provider is now a lot quieter than it used to be.  I get a lot, and I mean a lot, of BOT messages, whch I systematically delete, but otherwise the sky here is actually pretty nice too!