The short prayer which follows was inspired by participation to family discussions about next Christmas and from the discovery of the article and website mentioned below. It is a prayer which is perfect for everybody, regardless of religion. You can fill the empty square brackets with whatever you want, from the name of any God to… your own, and it will still make sense. And it’s good even if you don’t celebrate Christmas yourself and nobody celebrates it around you. All in all, it’s probably good (modern life being what it is) even at other times of the year.

[…], please help me to:

• spend all this period around people who are more, not less serene and untroubled than usual… because it's Christmas
• be more, not less serene and untroubled etc…
• make (and receive) as little Christmas gifts as possible, or at least to…
• be drafted for as little Christmas shopping tours as possible
• stay away from stuff, from tableware to garlands, which will become hard to manage extra waste after just a few days
• not eat like a pig just because it's Christmas, or because what's on the table is actually very, very good
• decouple, for good, Christmas from spending
• in a nutshell, help me to have a sane, slow Christmas and …
• help all the kids around me to have the same kind of Christmas and enjoy it as much as possible. In spite of the huge pressure we all submit them to, or allow the media to exert on them.
  Oh, and I forgot the most important thing, considering how small a place the Internet is. Surely all* my relatives and friends who in these days are doing the very opposite of what I just asked will discover this page before Christmas (even those who don't use computers and the Internet yet…).

So […], please also help them all to relax and understand that I love them anyway. Really!

Merry Slow Christmas, everybody!