Video reveals festive highlight for Fifers

A total of 24 videos from towns across Scotland help to make up the advent calendar, with shoppers in Kirkcaldy High Street among those involved.

The Church of Scotland video project is expected to get up to 250,000 views, with each clip reflecting on the emotions of Christmas.

The videos carry a theme, such as ‘Shelter’, ‘peace’, or ‘journey’.

The Kirkcaldy video was filmed by Fife-based Ali Stark, a youth and children’s worker with the Church of Scotland.

He said that the response from local people had been overwhelmingly positive.

“I was initially approached towards the end of November to help create a video in Kirkcaldy,” he said. “We set up in Kirkcaldy High Street and spoke to shoppers there about their opinions on Christmas.

“The video is a compilation of nine or ten answers from members of the public, and they were all very positive.

“Our theme was ‘gifts’, and the question we asked was: ‘Is Christmas all about gifts? Or is there something more to it?’

“The response was great. We had a lot of people talking about family, which was clearly important to them.

“Some people said that Christmas was very special when you have children.

“Although we were asking about gifts, the topic of family was most prevalent.”

Rev Neil Glover, Church of Scotland ministries council convener said: “We’ve been absolutely delighted by the response.

“Some of the videos are made by ministers, but what we wanted to do was to broaden our scope and to reach out to people like Ali to get a view of the wider community.

“The result is that the types of videos we’ve had have been very eclectic, which is great.

“With the advent calendar, we found that some could obviously be quite jolly and celebratory. But they couldn’t all be like that.

“We have to remember that for some people Christmas can be a time of great sadness and loss. Some of the clips have been very reflective in tone.”

While 2015’s videos got 180,000 views over the course of December, this year’s crop have already reached 134,000 in the first week alone.

“This is a new idea by the Church of Scotland to use social media as a way to touch people’s lives.

“Everyone’s always looking at their phones or tablets, and this is an effort to make people take just a minute out of their lives to watch something that might make them think.”

The advent calendar can be found online at churchofscotland.advent-calendar.net, and the Kirkcaldy entry is scheduled to be unveiled on December 15.