A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 10: Let there be Light

To end my Christmas card musings I have this beautiful one from my alma mater, Spurgeon's College.  Blessed with a hilltop location and what amounts to an English country house as its main building, the College does not have to work hard to prepare an outwardly beautiful card (though when I lived in the building here it was certainly less salubrious on the inside).

The College does not have to work hard to produce a beautiful scene but someone has been working hard on Photoshop here.  Though perhaps not quite hard enough.

Here's what nearby (real) snow looks like on a dark scene:

And here's the mistiness you get at a distance when snow is falling:

That white airbrush layer of card snow just doesn't quite do it, does it?

But who's to complain - I love snow, even fake snow.  

Then there are the room lights.

What is remarkable here is that you can see more clearly through the unlit windows than through the allegedly lit ones!  The latter look like, well, yellow paint. Which they are, in a pixelian sense. Poor old Photoshop.  It works best when you don't really look at it.

But what is all this about?

As we prepare for 2016 this is what it is about - the desire for the picture postcard.  In pursuit of this houses will be expensively bought, vacations expensively taken, divorces expensively executed, medical procedures expensively undergone and children expensively tutored.  We cannot be content with a thin layer of real snow or a real beauty that isn't shining enough.

Yet photoshopping life does not lead to more beauty but fake beauty which can, at a deeper level, yield less beauty.  May God grant us that most elusive of Christian values in the 21st Century West: contentment.