Do Christmas and all the build-up to it affect you emotionally, whether you were brought up in a Christian background or not? As Sue writes, "Advent was at one time a dour season of prayer, fasting and penitence. For me a distinct melancholy hangs over our grey rainy islands during December's darkening days. Some people just enjoy the telly and the partying, and others doubtless try to ignore the whole thing. But I think there are also those who, like me, spend the festive season running an emotional gamut. Underlying the commercial clamour there's a nostalgic sense of loss; a wistfulness - not for how it used to be in Christmases past, but for how it might have been and never really was. Adventus: the coming. These twenty-five poems reflect on Christmases past and current; on lives lived; on endings of years and of relationships; on beginnings, anxieties, hopes, and an uncertain future." Though these poems are perennials, they also serve as daily Advent readings starting from the first day of December.