Christmas is almost here! With just five full days left the silly season has officially begun. Office parties, late night Christmas shopping, out-of-town family starting to arrive.

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The Mission release Once you’ve got your Christmas day menu sorted for next Thursday, have you thought about how you’re going to celebrate the day? Christmas traditions in New Zealand are normally pretty low-key for most Kiwi families – presents in the morning, then food, sun, food, and more sun.

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If you’d like to celebrate the holiday with a traditional Christian Christmas in mind, find a church service to ring in the celebratory day, and reacquaint yourself with many of your favourite Christmas carols from your childhood.

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Miracles have an allure, even for some non-believers. We know there’s no way to dis

prove them. We want the impossible to happen. And there’s something compelling about the idea that a divine entity is manifesting itself in the mundane.

Newsworthy? Maybe. Intriguing? Definitely. That the ‘Virgin Mary pebble’ made the news is great – isn’t it brilliant to have some positive news from the doom ‘n gloom merchants?

Christchurch woman Lisa-Marie Corlet hit the headlines with her tiny icon-on-a-stone. The Virgin Mary pebble was found at Kaikoura Beach with an image etched on its surface, seemingly of the Virgin Mary. Without any religious scruples, Corlet put the pebble up for sale on TradeMe with a buy now price of $50,000. After a fake bid or two and a second Virgin Mary pebble auction underway, the pebble sits at $26,900 (while you’re there, check out the ‘Pebble that doesn’t look like the Virgin Mary’ and the ‘Virgin Mary on a surfboard pebble’). Internationally, there are precedents – a decade-old toasted cheese sandwich bearing the image of the Virgin sold on eBay for $28,000. Apparently the buyer, a casino, took the sacred sandwich on tour before donating the money to charity.

When online readers were asked to give their feedback on the miraculous stone from Kaikoura Beach, one astute reader noted that the image resembled “a greedy woman rubbing her hands together in glee.” Hmm, you don’t say.