Wrapped Up

They were desperate for people to help at the Churches Together in Hornington stall at the town Christmas fair last Saturday, so I volunteered to go along for an hour. When I turned up there were in fact plenty of other attendants but I stayed anyway. We were supposed to be spreading the message of ecumenical peace and Christmas cheer by distributing packs of tea and biscuits from a Christian charity, tiny pots of bubble mixture for children, and wrapping shoppers’ presents. The ebullient member of the Roman Catholic congregation who shared my hour with me didn’t realise that most of the customers who visited us with presents to be inexpertly bundled in shiny paper and wreaths of sticky tape were members of other churches – I did – but eventually a few real people came by too. The very last, just as my hour was ending, was a young woman clutching a pink flamingo watering-can she’d selected as her workplace Secret Santa gift (an appalling custom which causes no end of angst and horror). ‘I was listening to a radio programme the other day which was saying how everything to do with flamingos is very popular at the moment’, I told her, a fashion of which she claimed to be unaware, having just grabbed it in a shop along the High Street. I decided that, along with my colleague, having wrapped that, there was nowhere else to go creatively, and I left to go and buy a helium-filled gold star for the nursery nativity service.ymnalHyman