When I met John yesterday, it was the first time I ______ him since Christmas.

- The sentence is in the past tense.
- There is a possibility of both past tense 'saw' and past perfect 'had seen' being correct.
- But as we have two actions in the past and the action of meeting happened first, it is better to use past perfect.
- We use perfect tense when we talk about two actions that happened in the same or near time period.

- Structure of sentence in the past perfect tense:
- Subject + had + V3 (past participle) ​
- Example: The player had broken his foot before the game finished.