‘Christmas gives us the opportunity to be the best we can be.’
Combining Passion and Compassion with Purpose and Action
Photo credit: BBC
Christmas is a story of hope
When Hope Lights Up The Darkness
Christmas is all about Camaraderie and Community, Family and Friends
A Time to Weave a New and Hopeful Tapestry of Life
The other day (Tue 19 Nov 2024), as I was reflecting on our annual GCGI Christmas message, I sat down for a well-deserved tea break. I turned to my wife and said, do you fancy watching something nice and inspiring on the telly? I never knew that what we were about to watch would become our GCGI message of Christmas hope, love and goodwill for 2024 and beyond.
Poet Lemn Sissay and his Christmas Journey
‘I found the most difficult days to be my birthday and Christmas because they were a reminder of everything I never had.’- Lemn Sissay
Choosing hope and action to inspire, enable, and empower
Lemn Sissay Meets Sally Phillips
Photo credit: BBC
‘Sally Phillips meets Lemn Sissay, who spent years in the care system after being taken from his mother as a baby. His is a tale of lost Christmases and rejection before he found the voice and words that have made him one of the most celebrated poets in the UK today. As Sally discovers, it’s a position that has now helped him bring the true meaning of Christmas to hundreds of other care leavers across the country.’- More on this later.
Lemn Sissay’s poetry is imbued with humanity and lyricism
Let There Be Peace
By Lemn Sissay
Let there be peace
So frowns fly away like albatross
And skeletons foxtrot from cupboards,
So war correspondents become travel show presenters
And magpies bring back lost property,
Children, engagement rings, broken things.
Let there be peace
So storms can go out to sea to be
Angry and return to me calm,
So the broken can rise up and dance in the hospitals.
Let the aged Ethiopian man in the grey block of flats
Peer through his window and see Addis before him,
So his thrilled outstretched arms become frames
For his dreams.
Let there be peace
Let tears evaporate to form clouds, cleanse themselves
And fall into reservoirs of drinking water.
Let harsh memories burst into fireworks that melt
In the dark pupils of a child’s eyes
And disappear like shoals of silver darting fish,
And let the waves reach the shore with a
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Lemn Sissay: ‘Everything in life is connected, and everything is connected to family’
‘The poet grew up in children’s homes and never knew a real Christmas. Now, he makes sure hundreds of care leavers feast in style each year. How – and why – does he do it?’
‘Christmas, says the poet Lemn Sissay, divides the world into two sorts of people. One group gathers around the domestic hearth: all jocularity and teasing, memories and traditions. The other group is, as in the Victorian cliche, outside the window looking in. They have never felt the warmth of the homely festive glow.
Most of us have families who, even if it’s with some reservation, we join for Christmas. We roll our eyes and sigh, we anticipate the annoyances; we steel ourselves for the nuances that only we could ever understand.
Sissay, though, is a member of the second group. He was raised in care, first in a foster family and then, from the age of 12, in a string of children’s homes. Christmas came with the tree and the fairy lights, the baubles and the presents, but all those other unseen ingredients – the real flavours of the season – were absent; all those essentials that, as the Grinch finally realised, can’t be bought from a shop.
Given what he’s missed, it would be understandable if Sissay were resentful and scathing about how thoughtlessly the rest of us sometimes complain about something so vital and yet unknown to him. But he is not – he is magnanimous…’- Continue to read
No care leaver should feel alone on Christmas Day.
Photo credit:needpix.com
Lemn Sissay's Christmas Dinner on BBC TV on Christmas Day
Welcome to The Christmas Dinner. It is an annual project founded by the poet Lemn Sissay MBE for communities to provide a Christmas Day for care leavers aged between 18 and 25. One they’ll never forget.
POEM A DAY: LEMN SISSAY
‘Let the Light Pour In’
And now, what I had promised you at the beginning:
What is Christmas? What is it all about?
Please see it all here:
Or
* You may equally be interested in watching the other two episodes in the series:
A Dancing Judge’s Guide to a Rewarding and Joyous Christmas
A Priest’s Guide to a Rewarding and Joyous Christmas
Christmas and New Year’s Greetings from Kamran and Annie Mofid
A time to open our hearts
“No matter how dark the night, morning always comes and our journey begins anew.”- Anonymous
As we celebrate in our various special ways
the gift of Life, Love and Light,
May Joy and Blessings be with you and your families
and may all people in the New Year
join together in serving the common good
and creating a world of peace and justice
where they learn war no more
and everyone sits under their own vine and fig tree
and no one makes them afraid.
May you find joy in the simple pleasures of life and may the light of the holiday season fill your heart with the hope for a better world
Please consider to make a donation to our charity for Christmas 2024 appeal:
What are you doing for Christmas?
This is a perspective from Lemn Sissay
Watch the Video HERE
The Christmas Dinner
No care leaver should feel alone at Christmas.
Please donate HERE