Welcome to what our calendars call the Boxing Day edition of Things Unseen.

As long as I can remember, it's always been a holiday in the United Kingdom, and so you can understand

that when I was a child that struck me as a very curious description for the day after Christmas.

It apparently was not the one day in the year when you were allowed to fight with your big

brother.

In fact I remember that people seem to think it was a kind of

tidy up the mess day after Christmas, put everything back in boxes. And I had my own

version because Christmas was apart from small gifts on my birthday

the one time in the year you would get a special present and so we looked forward to it anticipating it for weeks in advance and it was a magical day.

And I suspect like many other children on Boxing Day I would try to recapture the feelings of the day

before by putting my presents back into their

boxes and then opening them up again. But of course it was never the same, it could never be the same.

Christmas Day was Christmas Day. 24 hours only once a year

Unrepeated until near the end of the next long year. Another year to wait for the excitement, the joy, the presence.

And as a child I hated this let down and the demands it made on my patience. And try I might I could not make Christmas last.

And when I later became a Christian I couldn't help asking myself this question

is it possible to make Christmas last?

And that's where the words of Hebrews chapter 13 verse 8 have come to mean so much to me.

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

I suspect I may have referred to these words several times in the course of this past year

and maybe pointed out that the author of Hebrew

thinks of yesterday not as the day before today, but what he elsewhere calls the days of Jesus flesh.

...