A time for believing with all your heart
Be brave, sweetheart," says Kate McCann to her missing daughter Madeleine - and it would be hard to imagine a more heartbreaking Christmas message.
Be brave, sweetheart. It is the kind of thing a parent says to a four-year-old when they fall and scrape their knee, or when they are afraid of their first day at school, or when they wake in the night from a bad dream.
Be brave, sweetheart. It is the most natural thing in the world for a loving parent to say to a distressed child. And yet it seems so tragically inadequate for a little girl who was stolen from her family and who has been missing for nearly eight months.
There is something in the story of Madeleine McCann that has touched the heart of the world, and yet the world has let that little girl down.
She has been let down by the criminally incompetent Portuguese police force.
And by the £50,000-per-month Spanish private detectives and their dangerous, macho boasts of bringing Madeleine home by Christmas.
And by the poisonous hacks of the lurid Portuguese press.
And by the British people who flood internet chat rooms abusing Madeleine's parents for leaving her alone, as if apportioning blame somehow makes the tragedy of a missing child any less.
And yet hope remains.
In the absence of a body, and despite all the madcap theories of the Portuguese police, hope somehow remains that Madeleine McCann may yet be restored to the family that is torn to bits without her.
Especially now. Especially at Christmas.
Despite all the gluttony and materialism, the story of Christmas remains the story of a child and innocence somehow surviving in a wicked world. Against all the odds.
If Christmas is about anything, then it is about our belief - and our desperate need to believe - that goodness can survive.
Jesus will survive the murderous wrath of Herod. Scrooge will find pity in his heart for Tiny Tim, and the boy will live.
And Madeleine will go home to her family.
It is more than 150 years since Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. But that story endures and retains the power to move us because it speaks to the human heart, and gives us hope when hope is fading.
"He sat very close to his father's side, upon his little stool," Dickens writes of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.
"Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the child and wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken from him."
If you can't feel even a glimmer of hope in your heart at Christmas, then I guess you never will.
Be brave, sweetheart.
For previous Tony Parsons columns see our website at
http://www.mirror.co.uk
