“Christmas is for families.”  How often have you heard that said in the last few weeks?

The prevailing narrative is that of a perfect family opening presents, eating together and playing games.  This of course completely ignores the reality of feuding cousins, rebellious children, struggling parents, failing marriages, senile grandparents and hundreds of other ways in which families can be divided, and which make even the idea of Christmas a nightmare to many.

Additionally there are all those people who face Christmas alone.  Sometimes they are mission workers, far from their loved ones.  Perhaps there are elderly widows or other singles who have nobody to be with.  Maybe there are sick people who can’t get out, or foreigners who have no connections.  And the homeless.

There are many ways in which we can do our small bit to address some of these needs:

• We could volunteer to help with a soup kitchen or homeless shelter
• We could befriend an international student (Friends International has a great way of doing this)
• We could help with refugee resettlement programme
• We could open our church or community centre to be a place of welcome for those who have nowhere else to go.

Perhaps the key to this is stretching our understanding of the word ‘family’.  As I remarked in a previous blog, Western individualism has impacted our understanding of this term, and indeed even the concept of the nuclear family is a uniquely Western model.  Other cultures (including the Biblical ones) often understand family in a way that the West would more likely think of as ‘neighbourhood’ or ‘community’.

This Christmas, instead of shutting ourselves behind our doors, why don’t we involve the marginalised, disadvantaged, lonely and distressed by extending our family to include some of them?