Editor's blog December 2006

This issue is devoted to shopping, feasting and coping.

But what about Christmas, you may ask? Jesus and goodness and... Christianity? Good point.
“I’m not looking forward to Christmas” a friend confides “a lot of hassle and a lot of expense”. So how, in a near-Godless age, do we stop Christmas becoming no more than a festival of children’s greed and parents’ exhaustion?

Radio 4 addicts may have followed Today presenter John Humphrys’ search for faith. We imbibe our religion with our mother’s milk, he maintains, but then many of us lose it. Like Humphrys, those of us who are journalists may have grown disillusioned by bearing witness to war and tragedy. Others, like my husband reared in the Soviet Union, learn a suspicion of dogma and the intent behind it. Blaming religion for bloodshed and genocide, from the Crusades onwards, is also popular - although the biggest murderers of the 20th century, Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein, were not religious men.

But, be it religion or another set of rules, any society - and by implication every family - needs a moral code. In 1991 I watched the Soviet Union collapse and continued to live in Moscow throughout the ensuing chaos. What was dismantled was without doubt imperfect and corrupt, but the ensuing vacuum was also terrifying: a jungle world awarding survival only to the fittest.
Listening to news reports from Britain today one detects a similar lack of direction. Young Britons drink more and fight more than any in Europe, and one can sympathise with Muslim parents who do not want their offspring to sign up to a morally bankrupt society.

Which doesn’t mean that you have to rush to church this Christmas. If you can’t stomach organised religion, look for your spirituality elsewhere - but look for it all the same. The late Times columnist, Bernard Levin, Jewish, once wrote that despite not being a Christian he was grateful for the cultural riches Christianity had given the world: the music and literature, art and architecture. For some, the Passions of Bach or the soaring heights of a cathedral prompt a spiritual journey which is not necessarily Christian.

Or take your loved ones as inspiration. Amidst the fairy lights and flashing santas, look at your family - your partners and children and parents and friends - and dwell for a moment on what they truly mean to you? Having people to love is the greatest gift of all; it is what makes us whole.

❖ ❖ ❖

The Rendezvous launched in June this year and this is our 7th issue. Before the launch we had a year of meetings, drank endless cups of coffee and in some cases smoked a thousand cigarettes while we tried to work out if there really was a market for an English-language magazine in Basse-Normandie? It seems that there is and all of us at the Rendezvous want to thank all of you for the thousands of enthusiastic letters and emails we have received and wish all our readers a very Happy Christmas and every success and happiness in 2007.