Many people like to give their houses a good clean before putting up Christmas trees and Christmas decorations. The rituals associated with decorating our houses for Christmas go back many years and vary from family to family, but often, these are accompanied by the winter equivalent of the ‘spring clean’!
Decorations and trees are often kept in the loft, and so there is a sense of unearthing these treasures once again and dealing with any dust and damage done to them in the previous eleven months.
Our lives can often feel dusty and dirty, but the good news is we have a God who specialises in cleaning! The Message version of Ps 51 says, ‘Scrub away my guilt, soak out my sins in your laundry’ and goes on to say, ‘Soak me in your laundry and I’ll come out clean, scrub me and I’ll have a snow-white life.’ We can be grateful for the blessing of being clean and purified by God. (1 Jn 1:9)
