In offices, looming holidays and the approach of the end of another year are celebrated with a general relaxation of discipline and accompanied from time to time by festive lashings of liquor and yes, there is such a thing as a free lunch. I had one last week.

The celebrations will adjourn to the nation’s homes on Christmas Day and it will all be very jolly, except for those families in poverty who can’t afford to do it right and have to rely on charity; and the families who really hate each other’s guts but will get together anyway because tradition demands it.

But there are many of us — a growing number, I suspect — who would rather the season was more restful and reflective as we try to keep in focus that which, as they say, is the reason for the season. For me and for hundreds of thousands of my Christian brothers and sisters in this land we used to call Godzone, this time of the year is hugely significant only because it celebrates the beginning of the greatest story ever told, the biblical record of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Son of Man and Son of God.

But, many will ask: what is the relevance of that for me today? Why should I care? Well, that’s not for me to say, but consider this...Jesus Christ (he who is the source of Christmas) was born in a cowshed at the back of a pub on the outskirts of a small town in Israel in the middle of winter because his parents had to obey the edicts of a pragmatic, debt-ridden and rapacious Government.

He spent his infancy as a refugee, living in exile in a foreign land to escape the brutal depredations of a depraved king who had every child under two in and around Bethlehem slaughtered just in case one might be the prophesied Messiah. Jesus’ childhood was spent in a small town in Galilee, the son of a carpenter — scion of a blue-collar family.

He was, byall accounts, what many would call today a “good kid”. He would have had friends — and enemies — among the children of Nazareth; he might even have had to put up with sniggering behind his back because his mother became pregnant before she married his father. In his teens he joined the family business, serving his apprenticeship as a carpenter under the watchful and competent eye of his tradesman father.

We can imagine him lovingly fashioning timber for use in construction and agriculture, such as easy yokes to make light burdens for oxen. We can suppose that at times business was brisk and there was plenty for all; at others that there was little or no work and economies had to be made, things done without. And always there would have been the bruising taxes imposed by the Government and the religious hierarchy.

Then, at age 30, he laid down his carpenter’s tools for the last time, was baptised by John the Baptist, filled with the Holy Spirit, and began his ministry — a brief three years of preaching, teaching, healing and miracle-working which, as no event before or since, turned the world upside down.

He lived on charity, he suffered wrenching temptation, he knew loneliness as few men ever have. He was hungry, homeless, broke, tired, frustrated — even angry. His message of love, forgiveness and reconciliation with God was spurned; in the end he was treated as a common criminal, beaten, humiliated, spat on — then executed in an act of appalling cruelty. He was “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”.

There will be those this Christmas season, as the nation downs tools for its annual wassail, who will - through unemployment, poverty or other disadvantage — feel despised and rejected by society. There will be those who — haunted, perhaps, by ghosts of Christmases past, by recollections of hurts and lost opportunities — will spend their time in sorrow.

There will be those who — as a result of road accidents, suicides, drownings or any number of other human tragedies - will face heart breaking grief.

My Christmas wish is that all such people might find hope in Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem that first Christmas Day, whose life was lived across the full gamut of human experience and emotion. Even today, seated at the right had of God, he stands ready “to heal the broken hearted... to set at liberty those who are oppressed ... to comfort all who mourn... ”That’s the true message of Christmas.

Let us remember it.