I've just come home from the Parish Church, where a crowded church saw Christmas Day in at the Midnight Communion.

I'm tempted to call it Midnight Mass, because that sounds so much snappier; but I was enjoying a long conversation with a cousin in Ireland this evening, and from her County Dublin perspective it was just not acceptable to call it a mass if you weren't a (Roman) Catholic.

Funny, that. The name Mass is virtually meaningless. It comes, so we're told, from the closing words of the Latin service: Ite, missa est. Which means 'Go, it's finished.' So you'd think that all Christians could happily call it Mass. But history forbids - and in Ireland history is king.

Anyway, to come back to the celebration in the Parish Church...

The Church of England web site offers an order of service specially for Christmas, and that's the one we used. In the old days, we had virtually no choices when we celebrated the Holy Communion. The only concessions to Christmas were the Collect of the Day and a Proper Preface. Now it's very different. There are responses - dialogues between priest and people - at the beginning and at many other points in the service, all rejoicing in the coming of the Son of God into the world. The Nicene Creed is replaced by a passage from the Bible concentrating on the coming of Christ into the world. And so on. It all, to my mind at least, makes a wonderfully Christmassy Communion.

And, as I reported in my last post (no, not the bugle call! Actually it's the last-but-one post), the wonderful voice of Kira Slovacek lifted our hearts and stirred our emotions as she sang before and during the service. Mozart's Alleluia (it means Praise the Lord) was a great response to the news of Jesus as told in the Bible passage from Titus. The aria from Messiah, 'Come unto Him', meant a lot as people were coming forward to received the bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ.

You could sense that some people felt like applauding after Kira's singing, but realised that her contribution was all part of the worship, so they refrained. Quite right.

The Rector John Greed had a telling anecdote in his sermon. It was about a harassed primary school teacher whose pupils were rehearsing their nativity play. The Wise Men went missing. The teacher (Mrs Alexander - not the hymn-writer, apparently) found herself shouting 'Where are the Wise Men?' After a while one of them appeared, quite unconcerned. It seems that a doll was lost. The child playing the Wise Man said, "We were looking for Jesus."

Just so. I think some of us found Him tonight.