It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Christmas trees and lights and decorations everywhere, Christmas songs and carols in all the shops and everybody hoping for a really happy time.

But then I heard something which started me thinking. The World’s Longest Car is a Cadillac in California. It is 100 feet long and has 26 wheels – one for every seat. It has TVs and DVD players and a satellite dish, six phones and laptops on broadband. It has cocktail cabinets, a king-size water bed, and a swimming pool with a diving board and a Jacuzzi. The world’s longest car bends in the middle to go round corners. It cost 2 million dollars and weighs 10 tons. And it comes with its very own Tow-Truck. Because this car is so jam packed full of accessories that the one thing it hasn’t got room for is an engine!

But surely a car isn’t really a car if it hasn’t got an engine. All the optional extras in the world aren’t worth as much if the most basic essential is missing! And that made me think about the way many people celebrate Christmas.

We’re looking forward to the food, the turkey and trimmings and the pudding and the cake, all washed down with plenty of Christmas spirits. People spend so much on the presents and the cards and the parties. But you don’t actually need these things to have a happy Christmas. Even Santa and his reindeer, and Christmas trees and fairy lights, are only the wrappings, the tinsel, the optional extras of Christmas. We don’t need these things for our celebration, and billions of people around the world don’t have them anyway.

But there wouldn’t be a Christmas without Christ. If that Baby had not been born in that stable in Bethlehem 2000 years ago, we wouldn’t have anything to celebrate. Listen to the words the Angel said to Mary, the Mother of Jesus.

Luke 1:30 31 You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. … the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.

Christians believe that Jesus was unique, the Son of God, God born as a human being to show us what God is like and to make a way for us to know God again, Jesus the Saviour of the world, Jesus, the reason for the season.

However many accessories you have, a car isn’t really a car without an engine. And Christmas isn’t really Christmas without Jesus Christ. I wish us all a really joyful Christmas – and let’s all remember whose birthday it is.