A few years back, St James would hold a single Christingle service on Christmas Eve, then came the year that 500 people all turned up…
After that the decision was taken to hold the service twice, at 2pm and 4pm, and to allocate seating using free tickets.
Roll on to this year, and we had three services planned, at 2pm, 4pm and 6pm, with 200 tickets for each. The tickets were made available at the beginning of December, and within days had gone, and we’ve had so many people phoning up wanting tickets, that we’ve now had to add a fourth Christingle service at 12 o’clock – and it looks likely that we’ll fill the Church then too.
That of course leaves us with one big problem, traditionally the junior choir have made the actual Christingle’s – not too much of a problem when we had one service, but with so many people coming along now, short of bringing child slavery to Finchampstead we need lots of extra help to put them all together. It’s not overly complicated – basically four cocktail sticks, a glow stick (much to the chagrin of the traditionalists the combination of small children, candles and a jam packed church was too much for Health and Safety), an orange and some red ribbon – but there are a lot to do. The production line gets going on Saturday afternoon at the Parish Centre!
Once those four services are done though, there is the other popular service, Midnight Mass – one service we can’t do more than once, so we just have to try and fit everybody in. Last year we had people standing in the vestry and more people standing in the north aisle – heaven knows where we’ll put people if more turn up this year.
