thought exercise on Christmas Morning

Kristen Welch, in her book Raising Grateful Kids in an Entitled World , described the growing discontent their family experienced after pursuing more and more stuff. She describes it this way with ...

The angel said there would be no end to his kingdom.  So for three hundred days I carried rivers and cedars and mountains.  Stars spilled in my belly when he turned. Now I can’t stop touching hi...

Christ the King Sunday has also been called “Stir Up Sunday” because the collect for the day in the Anglican church began, “Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people…” (The co...

I don’t have the nerve to stand up on Christmas Eve and preach about the choreography of childbirth, but I wish I did. I wish I had the nerve to preach about Mary’s increased estrogen production, a...

Christmas is about receiving presents, but consider how challenging it is to receive certain kinds of gifts. Some gifts by their very nature make you swallow your pride. Imagine opening a present on C...

It is astonishing that some people still doubt the existence of Santa Claus. Despite the vast amount of photographic evidence, the hundreds of annual reports on Father Christmas’s activities from perf...

We have been having  epiphanies like suns, all this year long. And now, at its close  when the planets  are shining through frost, light runs like music in the bones,  and the heart ke...

While Christmas traditions vary the world over, gift-giving is a central practice just about anywhere Christ's birth is celebrated. Sometimes gifts are exchanged on De­cember 6, the feast day of S...

Ann was a working mother in her 30’s, and one of the millions of women who saw the marshmallow castle on the December cover of a popular women’s magazine. Ann confessed, later, that she felt like a “b...

Several years ago near the start of Advent, I awoke to a television report of five people murdered in a fast-food restaurant, and later that same morning I opened my newspaper and read that two robber...

As early as AD 248, Origen suggested that the star of Bethlehem was a comet—and there continue to be astronomers who think that he was right. Comets are icy objects that orbit the sun. When seen fro...

One Christmas Eve in Vermont when my children were small, we did the things you do when your children are small on Christmas Eve. We stuffed and hung their stockings. We put out a draught of cider and...

Our family started watching our Christmas movies early this year. We love Christmas Vacation , Charlie Brown’s Christmas, Home Alone (one and two), Rudolph, and Frosty the Snowman ...

In many Christian lands Epiphany is the most important feast of Christmas. Especially in Latin countries the arrival of the Wise Men, the Three Kings, looms large in the imagination. My native city, N...

There is a story from Czech bishop Monsignor Hnilica of a Christmas Eve with Saint Teresa of Calcutta. There was a knock on the convent’s door during their simple but festive dinner, and the nun who w...

Christmas (a shortened form of "Christ’s mass”) has been an embattled holiday for much of its history— and not just because talking heads on TV like to argue about the “war on Christmas” every ye...

It was a time like this,  war and tumult of war,  a horror in the air. Hungry yawned the abyss— and yet there came the star  and the child most wonderfully there. It was a time like this ...

In rural Msinga, a municipality in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa, the highlight of Christmas Day festivities is when men, newly returned home from work in the big cities, gather to sing a...

If you ever find yourself sympathizing with Charles Dickens’ character Ebenezer Scrooge regarding the commercialization of Christmas, you’re not alone—this has been a common complaint for quite some t...

In the sixteenth century, Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci journeyed to China, bringing religious art to share the Christian story with those unfamiliar with it. The Chinese readily embraced images of t...

Christmas carols always seem to bring out the best in people. It’s as if we can travel back in time to a place where life was less complicated and Christmas was full of joy and magic. The churches fil...

When we turn toward Advent, the name on our lips is Emmanuel, God with us . So much in Christian faith relies on what the faithful actually mean when we say that name. Western Christianity has fo...

An angel came to me And I was unprepared To be what God was using. Mother I was to be A moment I despaired, Thought briefly of refusing. The angel knew I heard According to God’s word, ...

There was a woman who was baking her Christmas cookies and she heard a knock at the door. She opened the door to find a man who was dressed in pretty tattered clothes, and he was obviously poor. And h...

My ten-year-old son Jim had to write a play for Christmas for his Sunday School class. He made it a dialogue between two animals at Bethlehem. It goes like this: Donkey: It sure is cold, is it not? ...

The incarnation has often been described as “The Great Exchange,” whereupon God took on human form so that we might participate in God's divine life (through the Holy Spirit). In a sermon on the n...

In this excerpt, Frederick Buechner shares a meditation on the vulnerability of Jesus’ birth: The child born in the night among beasts. The sweet breath and steaming dung of beasts. And nothing is...

Presentations of the Matthean narrative that have had such an illustrious life in art and imagination are not complete without the disturbing involvement of Herod and the political killings that resul...

In the final book of the Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle , C. S. Lewis invites us to experience the manger scene in a fresh way. He challenges us to see the Christmas story as if we are witness...

If we’re ever concerned with being wrapped up in Christmas busyness, it may be worth considering the Italian legend of La Befana. The elderly Befana was in her home when suddenly she was visited by th...