Harehills ❤️ Love

Welcome to Day 24 of the 2025 Harehills Good News Advent Calendar!

We have reached the final door. For our last story, I wanted to talk about something that happened just last Thursday, the 18th of December, at the Compton Centre.

It was a Christmas Carol and Nativity Play, performed entirely by local Roma children. It was organised by a brilliant new group, Roma Roots Community CIC, in partnership with the Council’s GRT Outreach Team (known locally as just “the GRT”).

I’ll be honest with you all—and with myself. I haven’t covered the Roma community on HarehillsLove anywhere near enough. I don’t have the same deep connections there that I have with other groups in LS9, and that is a gap I need to bridge. That is why events like this are such a gift. They are open, they are public, and they are incredibly welcoming. They give us a chance to just turn up, shut up, and listen.

And what we heard on Thursday was beautiful.

We all know the Nativity story is central to a British Christmas, but it is just as huge in Romanian culture. Seeing these children perform wasn’t just about watching a school play; it was about watching two cultures shake hands. Whether it’s our traditional school nativity or the Romanian tradition of “Steaua” (where children carry a wooden star and sing carols door-to-door), the heart of it is the same: children, music, and hope.

To understand why this matters so much, we have to look back at the difficult summer we had in July 2024. A lot of that pain came from a breakdown in trust—a feeling among families that they weren’t being listened to, understood, or valued by authority figures.

So, to see Roma families right in the heart of a Council building—the Compton Centre—working with the team there to put on a show? That is powerful. It sends a message that is louder than any riot: We are here, we are part of this family, and we have a voice.

The event turned the library into a true home for everyone—filled with proud parents, support workers, and neighbours like me who just wanted to share in the joy.

It is proof that while shouting gets the headlines, singing together is what actually rebuilds a community.

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Now, I’m writing this as an atheist. I know that in a neighbourhood as diverse as ours, many of you will be celebrating Christmas tomorrow, while others will be looking forward to Eid, Diwali, or Vaisakhi at other times of the year. Some of us don’t do religion at all.

But you don’t need to be a believer to believe in what happened on Thursday. Whether you see it as a holy miracle or just the magic of community, the feeling is the same. It’s about neighbours stopping to listen to one another.

So, to those of you celebrating, I wish you a very Merry Christmas. To everyone else, I wish you a peaceful break and a quiet, restful couple of days. Be well.

I will be back tomorrow with my round up of the year, giving thanks and acknowledgements, but this is the end of the Advent Calendar proper for 2025.