Tis the Reason......

I love Christmas. I always have. The bright colors, the lively music, the smells of vanilla and balsam, the harried yet happy faces of fellow shoppers. I love searching for the right gift, and the exhilaration of successfully finding it. I love playing Secret Santa, imagining the delight the recipient is sure to feel upon finding the colorfully wrapped gift on the porch. I love the family parties, the shrieking of children's voices as they dash through Grandma's house in pursuit of one another, the family photo montage put together by Uncle Mike. I love our gaily decorated Christmas trees, and Daron's Christmas Village. I love the traditional foods: cashew brittle, pecan bars, homemade fudge, soft sugar cookies with cream cheese frosting and m&m's. Almond Roca! Candy canes! Those neopolitan candies Brach's makes that I can't find anymore. Pizza on Christmas Eve with a side of my husband's homemade French Onion soup. I'm salivating!

I cherish my memories of the Christmases my mother used to create, on a limited budget, for 8 children. She made everything magical. I don't know how she did it, but, somehow, she always managed to scrape together whatever was necessary to provide each of us with something special under the tree from the jolly fat man. Daron and I have been fortunate enough to always have the means to provide our children with whatever their little hearts desired for Christmas, within reason, but I'm not sure if I've provided them with the same caliber of memories I hold most dear.

One tradition that we've carried over from my childhood is the retelling of the Nativity on Christmas Eve. Our children dress up, using towels and blankets, to play the parts of Mary and Joseph, shepherds, angels, and various animals. Even at their ages, they still consider that an essential part of our celebration, and insist on acting out the story as recounted in the New Testament narrative.

The past couple of Christmases have been a challenge for me, as I am the one who narrates the story as the children play the parts. As my beliefs have come into sharper focus, I've struggled to read aloud a story that I'm not convinced with any degree of certainty is factual. Last year I stumbled through the telling, choking on my words, blaming my difficulty on the memory of our beloved Grandma Henrie who had passed away the prior Christmas. Authenticity and integrity are vitally important to me, and I didn't want to appear to give credence to an account I no longer felt sure was based on anything more than legend. Neither did I want to spoil Christmas Eve for my loved ones, who cherish the story as they cherish their own testimonies of its Star. So, I muddled through, quickly moving on to my favorite story of the evening, "The Night Before Christmas", by Clement C. Moore. Now that's a story that warms my heart!

As this season has progressed, I've pondered for many hours the story of the First Christmas. I've spent considerable time this year studying the history of the New Testament, discovering that what I had always believed was an inspired retelling of actual, historical accounts, was merely the memories of relatively unknown spectators of the times, recorded decades after His death. They weren't even contemporaries of Christ's, as they lived years after He had exited stage left. They were recording the story as it had been retold to them, passing through countless sources, the number unknown to us. And the study of contemporary events has shown that many of the most cherished facets of the narrative have no basis in fact. They cannot be corroborated by historical events that are known to have occurred. And the two recordings of the Nativity, found in Matthew and Luke, contradict one another in significant ways, contradictions that cannot be easily reconciled. They cannot both be true. One or the other got it wrong. But which one? The story as we know it, the one shared in church services and homes throughout the Christian world on Christmas Eve, is an amalgamation of the two, meshing the narratives and creating a beautiful picture of a divine birth, attended by animals in a stable, and noted by shepherds abiding nearby, later by kings of noble birth bearing gifts.

Written history comes to us through the lens of the writer, with his or her unique perspective influencing the telling of the story. It's a rare writer who can relay pure fact, without revealing something of their motivation in recording a particular story. So it is with New Testament writers. They each wanted to portray the life of Christ in a way that supported their own beliefs about who he was. And when their writings are analyzed, their own agendas are revealed. As I've become aware of the nuances present in the scriptural retelling of the Nativity, I've attempted to uncover the message each writer was trying to convey. And, for me, the underlying theme, no matter the details each presented as fact, was love. Pure love. Divine love. Love meant to motivate and elevate us, and most of all, to inspire us.

So this Christmas Eve, I'm going to narrate the story of the birth of Christ as usual, acknowledging that it is an important story, a story that inspires us, and lifts us. And I'll focus on the thread woven throughout the narrative that tells of love, both divine and earthly. The love of a Heavenly Father, who, because He loved the world, gave His only Begotten Son, that we might live forever with Him. The love of Mary, who, though still a child herself, accepted the role assigned to her, with all its inherent difficulties, and became the mother of the Savior of the world. The love of Joseph, Mary's betrothed, who, because he loved Mary, accepted her story of divine conception, though it flew in the face of everything he knew to be true, and stood by her side as she gave birth in a stable. The love of the Savior Himself, our elder brother, who came into the world as a tiny baby, and grew into a man who exemplified love, teaching us to care for one another as He cares for us. Though I don't believe in the literal historicity of the account, I believe in the message. And that's what I love the most about Christmas.