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27 January is Holocaust Memorial Day. This year 2020 also marks the 75th anniversay of the the liberation in 1945, by the Soviet army, of the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The theme of the Holocaust Memorial Day 2020 is 'stand together'. Nearly 14 years ago I stood in front of a museum case in Poland containing beautiful hand-stitched baby garments. I was a visitor in the museum site of Auschwitz-Birkenau . I stood and wept. Some mother or grandmother had lovingly prepared those garments for a child who probably never lived to grow out of them or may never have worn them. Were they confiscated when a carefully packed suitcase was emptied on arrival at the death camp. So much hope for the baby's future must have gone into those stitches. Were those loving stitches wasted when the hope for that particular child died? Maybe not. As a mother and grandmother, as I stood by that display I felt for a few moments that I was the mother or grandmother of that baby f...

It's 25 January, the birthday (in 1759) of the Scottish poet Robert Burns . All over the world, people of Scottish descent and others who get drawn in to Burns Night celebrations, will this evening be eating haggis. Ours will be a low key celebration for just 2 people, but we have haggis. What else could we eat on Burns Night? It will be a traditional Scottish haggis and comes from a manufacturer based in an area of Scotland where some of my forbearers were farmers of sheep and growers of oats, 'neeps' and 'tatties'. The basic haggis recipe is the minced heart, lungs and liver of a sheep, seasoned and mixed with oatmeal, stuffed into a sheep's stomach lining and boiled. It is traditionally served with mashed root vegetables like potatoes and swedes/turnips. Haggis is one of those foods that tastes much better than it looks. However elaborately it is sometimes presented, a stuffed sheep's stomach just looks revolting to my mind. It does seem strange t...

6th January is the Feast of the Epiphany. It marks the end of the Christmas season and the start of the Epiphany season which continues to Candlemas on 2nd February. The celebration on 6th January features the strange outsiders from the east, the magi, the 'wise men'. They followed the direction of a new star, expecting to find a new special king. What they found was a toddler with his parents, in an ordinary house in Bethlehem, on what was presumably for Mary, Joseph and their son Jesus, an ordinary day. And they were overwhelmed with joy.   You can find my previous posts for Epiphany on my  Epiphany page here . Something wonderful was revealed to those mysterious strangers that the locals didn't see. They experienced an 'epiphany', an eye-opener, a moment of revelation. They glimpsed the glory of God in the face of the child Jesus. You can read the story in Matthew's gospel here and you might notice that unlike most nativity plays there are no cam...