Christmas Eve: lighting-up time.

Christmas Eve, you walk down to the Christingle service in the village with your mother, and Laurie your niece and Jonathan your nephew.

Christingle is a junior version of Midnight Mass, introduced to discharge some of the static electricity that most children are primed with at this time of year, and try to connect Christmas with the Church.

Tonight, St Bartholomew's has a full house, side to side and front to back, but apparently it isn't as full as in years gone by, when the kids ran riot and the vicar smiled, holding a painted melon above his head, announcing the birth of Jesus.

There's a brief sermon on the Germanic origins of the service, delivered from behind a lectern in the shape of a soaring eagle, giving the vicar the look of an aerobatics stunt-man lashed above the wings of a single-seater plane.

Lots of crying and screaming and looking for lost children under pews and behind curtains. A long queue for the one toilet in the vestry.

The church like an aviary, full of strange sounds and exotic noises flitting from one wooden beam to another up under the roof.

The high point is the distribution of the Christingles, in which all the children (and some of the excitable adults) surge forward to collect what looks like a First-World-War hand-grenade - an orange with a candle jammed in its navel, stabbed by four cocktail sticks, each sporting a jelly tot or a sultana. Every orange is finished off with a red ribbon around its equator.

The vicar reminds us that we hold in our hands the fruit of the earth and the light of the world, and the four seasons and the bread of heaven, and the death, and the resurrection.

After receiving their payload, the children perform an orderly procession along the outside aisles and back up the middle, until gridlock occurs.

Then all candles are lit, the next from the last, and the house lights are cut. Each child stands with a face like a mask, lit from below. Away In A Manger is sung, and you amaze yourself by remembering most of the words, and flush out a couple of tears from each eye by blinking, and take them into your mouth with the tip of your tongue.

The vicar makes his closing remarks, including some safety tips on the extinguishing of the candles.

When the lights go on, most of the jelly tots have disappeared, and three eight-year-olds have set fire to the cocktail sticks and are dangling the red ribbons in the flames.

A parent steps in as an arson attack on the Lady Chapel looks possible. Another boy drips molten wax into the hood of his brother's anorak, and a little girl spears herself in the nostril while attempting to eat one of the sweets from the wooden skewer.

The church is hazy with blue smoke, as if some ancient ritual or powerful act of magic had taken place, involving sacrifice and fire.

The big doors open on to a cold, clear night. Parents lead their families along the churchyard and through the iron gates at the far end, towards Christmas Day morning.

Your mother and the children climb into a car and turn a corner. Half a dozen of you stand in the doorway, not in any rush to go anywhere, see anyone.

Under the stars, someone notices the sky, and points out the constellations with the burning laser-red tip of a cigarette. Aries, grazing in the path of the planets. Orion the hunter, with one foot in the river, lifting his club and his shield to the great orange eye of Taurus the bull. Pegasus, the winged horse, with the fish of Pisces splashing about under its hooves and Andromeda reaching out for its reins.

The flickering silver pulse of Sirius just above the horizon - a filling in the mouth of the great dog Canis, bearing its teeth at Lepus the hare. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the great bear and its cousin, tethered to Polaris, plodding eternally like circus animals around the North Star.

And Gemini, the twins, falling through space together at arm's length, repelled and obsessed at the same time, pushing each other away and hanging on for grim death. Your stars. Your stars. Your sign.

The cigarette gets flickered away, upwards into the bare branches of trees lining the graveyard, into the Milky Way. Then you split up, go your separate ways, towards different lives under the same patch of the sky.