Christmas, they say, comes but once a year. In these days, it seems to also last for much of that year - but this volume is not just for Christmas!

For the religious amongst us, this annual celebration of the Birth of Christ must seem bitter sweet: it's acknowledgment by billions of people, countered by the pervasive spread of material possessions translating the event to little more than a sales pitch for material wares. Most religions celebrate their founders, but Christianity seems somehow to have lost possession of one of its key rituals in an ever more secular West. The spread of globalisation seems to have hindered rather than helped the true meaning of the festival. Children today are much more interested in what presents they might receive than any spiritual message. As parents too, most of us buy into this and indulge our offspring rather than instil the underlying themes and aims of the festival's meaning common to us all.

In this collection, we rely on the words and wisdom of such fine poets as John Milton, Emily Dickinson, Sir Walter Scott, Daniel Sheehan, William Wordsworth, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and a whole host of others to absorb us in a Christmas time of hope and togetherness. The experiences and memories they share with us speak of a time, of a world that did have a common purpose and an ambition to share good fortune with everyone.