Answers About Wine And Champagne

But in that time of peril, fret, austerity and shortage, and in the sooty-black bomb-ravaged London of that time, it shone out like a good deed in a wicked world. The towering spruce in the picture was only the second such tree in what has since become a tradition (and is now apparently threatened by supposed concern for the environment). The tree is pretty scrawny by today's standards, and its lights are sparse. Once, on the panel of the Australian equivalent of BBC's Question Time, broadcast from Sydney Opera House, I was asked to name a dangerous idea, in front of a huge and largely hostile Left-wing audience.

And the preacher said that at this time of the year, 'Normal time falls into step with eternity'. Should you loved this article and you would want to receive more details about ขายไวน์ kindly visit our internet site. It does not do so for very long, but it does. And this realisation that frozen Russian night, has made me understand that it is not feasting, or wine, or gifts that we are anticipating at Christmas. These are all very well. But in fact this, the supreme festival of our half-forgotten faith and culture, is the key to understanding why we are as we are and behave as we do.

Just as now, they were dark and worrying times. The darkness that evening was not only literal. The world was still full of danger and dissension. In that winter the western powers were busy confronting Josef Stalin's implacably evil Soviet Union in Berlin, with the astonishing airlift which eventually broke the Red Army's siege of the city. I can just remember when much of our country looked like this.

In my childhood we were not rationed, but there was no plenty either. In the weeks before Christmas, as the days shortened and the nights deepened and the cold intensified, I had a sense of something momentous happening. But I did not then really grasp what it was. I do so partly because of a sermon preached in St Andrew's Anglican Church in Moscow, at Christmas 1991. I think they had used its tower as a machine gun post. This Victorian brick church had been stolen by the Communist authorities during the 1917 Bolshevik coup d'etat.

Then they had despoiled it in the usual Communist way, eventually turning it into a recording studio. Can there be a more British season than Advent? Especially when the frost bites in the garden and the fog gathers in the street, and the short days darken, the whole landscape is filled with the anticipation of Christmas. Last week I saw on social media a profoundly moving photograph of London in early December 1948.

It shows two proper helmeted police officers admiring the Christmas tree sent each year by Norway as thanks for British help and support during the Second World War. The cold, the darkness, the fasting (if you can face it, Advent is a fast, just as Lent is) help us to understand that our Christianity is a great national possession, a light shining in darkness which only increases in power and meaning when that darkness thickens.