Another year is almost at its end. So, naturally enough, we start reflecting on the year that’s been.

For my family, the big moment of 2025 was undoubtedly my daughter’s wedding in April. Thanks be to God, it was a wonderful occasion on which she married a godly man from a wonderful Christian family. Another major milestone came in the last month: we sold our family home of 13 years and are now preparing to move in the new year. 

But there have also been enjoyable and memorable events on a very different level.

Just in the last few weeks, I’ve loved going back and rewatching 24, one of my favourite shows from the early 2000s, but this time enjoying it with my teenage sons and watching them experience the twists for the first time. And last month, my beloved Beatles found a way to generate even more new content despite breaking up 55 years ago.

These recent pleasures got me thinking: What other fun moments did I enjoy in 2025? What were those little pleasures that kept me going?

What would it be for you? What cultural events did you look forward to? A long-awaited concert or a movie, a beloved TV show that had its final episode, a big sporting event?

Or maybe your memorable moments were more personal than cultural: your big annual holiday, your weekly golf day, a night out with friends, the start of the school holidays—or the end of the school holidays!

Some days, the pleasures that sustain us are even simpler and more obvious than any of that. My personal happy place for quite a bit of 2025 was cooking dinner for my family while watching an episode of The Chase. Whatever it was for you, those little moments are an important part of how we survive life in the modern world.

But, if I’m honest, as I look back on 2025 and how I navigated my way through the year, I wonder if I made too much of those little pleasures from day to day and week to week.

It’s not that I feel guilty for enjoying life’s simple pleasures. It’s just that I think those things became too important to whether I made it from one day to the next with a smile on my face.

At the same time, perhaps that means the bigger things in life weren’t important enough to me—specifically, the biggest thing of all: the joy of living as a Christian. What place did the joy of knowing God as my heavenly Father, knowing Jesus as my Lord and Saviour, living for the Lord, experiencing his grace in my life in countless ways—what place did all of that hold for me in 2025? At times during the year, those majestic, eternal realities were simply not as important as they should have been in sustaining me and giving me joy.

Now, these might be the Yuletide musings of a tired, busy, middle-aged man, but I doubt I’m the only one who’s found it easy to let the little things become big and the big things become little. Our world offers us so many distractions, so many pleasures, so many ways to be entertained or numbed. Before we know it, we’ve exchanged joy for pleasure.

This is not a new idea. In his biography Surprised by Joy, CS Lewis wrote about how human beings are tempted to substitute the fleeting pleasures of life, or even the more substantial pleasures of life, for real, lasting joy. He summed it up perfectly: “I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy”.*

The danger at this time of year is that Christmas becomes, at best, one more brief and passing pleasure. We sing a few carols, we open a few presents, we eat a few times our own bodyweight in food, and on Boxing Day we wonder, “What’s next?”

Good news of great joy

Thankfully, however we’ve made our way through the long and winding road of 2025, Christmas offers us a chance to take stock and to turn our minds and hearts once again to something far better than fleeting pleasures.

And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:10–11)

Why is Christmas about the deepest joy that we could ever experience?

First, Christmas is about God giving us a Saviour.

Christmas is about God keeping a promise hundreds of years in the making—a promise that one day a Saviour would come, born in the town and the line of David. At Christmas, God provided someone to meet our greatest need: not a toy designer to create more Labubus, not a pop princess to tour the world, not a rapper to invent the new ‘6–7’. No, God gave us a Saviour. God knew that we needed a Saviour to save us from our sin, to bring forgiveness, to reconcile us to God. And so, at that first Christmas, God gave us his precious Son as our Saviour.

Second, Christmas is about joy because of the identity of that Saviour. Our Saviour is “Christ the Lord”. Jesus is God’s anointed King over the entire cosmos, and he is God himself, come to dwell among us in the flesh. That baby, born in humility and love, shows us who God is and how we can be saved from our sin.

Nothing in this tired, sick, distracted world can match the real joy of Christmas. The arrival of Jesus tells us that God is good, God is for us, and God is with us. At the heart of all reality sits a loving Creator, a perfectly gracious and kind Father, who has given us everything we really need.

My prayer for you this Christmas is that you won’t just see the celebrations as one more pleasure in a long string of pleasures to keep you going. I pray that you’ll see Christmas as it really is: “good news of great joy for all the people”. And I pray that you and those you love will know the joy of having Christ the Lord as your Saviour.

*CS Lewis, Selected Books, HarperCollins, 1999, p 1342.