(Slightly Irreverent) Christmas Thoughts

Since having babies and being pregnant and giving birth, Christmas means a lot more to me as a time to focus on a little baby being born in the most humble of circumstances.  The story has taken on so much more beauty and significance for me.

But I also have a lot more questions about it now, too.  I like some of these speculative blog posts that I have read: this one that explains a bit more about what an "inn" really was at the time; and this one, that offers an alternative explanation for how they ended up in a stable, with the idea that Mary doesn't need to be the passive little creature we sometimes portray her as.  I love that people manage to find new ways to interpret the nativity story.

For being an English major, I'm really bad at stuff like this.  I pretty much stick with what I know, and rarely delve deeper into a text unless I am forced to write a 5-page paper on it.  (Then I can whip one of those out like a boss.)  But this Christmas, the more I sat thinking about Mary laying the baby Jesus in a manger, the stranger it became to me.  All those paintings (many of which I love) that depict Mary sitting perfectly upright gazing at her tiny baby are so beautiful, but they are NOTHING like how I feel after giving birth...

By Carl Heinrich Bloch

This one, by Walter Rane, is closer to how birth feels to me, with Mary huddled around her baby...


But notice this one doesn't have the baby in a manger, which has sort of become a key point of the story.

I wondered, Why in the world Mary would put her baby there???

And then it hit me-- with all the messiness that goes along with giving birth, after it was all done with, Mary would have needed to stand up and clean herself off a bit, get herself put back together (so to speak).  And you really can't hold a baby while you're doing that.  And she probably would have needed Joseph's help, too.  She would have looked around at the mess of the stable and thought, Well, I can't set Him down in all this animal poop.  There's got to be somewhere cleaner I can lay my baby just for one minute...  And then she spied the manger in the corner.  And, of course, right before she picked him up again, that was when all the shepherds arrived.

In my head, I can see Mary rubbing her forehead in embarrassment and thinking to herself, "Seriously?  I just set him there for ONE MINUTE and THAT'S what gets recorded in the scriptures for everyone to read???  Ten minutes into this mothering gig and I'm already making a mess of things and everybody knows it!"


Welcome to the Mommy Wars, Mary.

But it's okay.  Your Son turned out just fine anyway.



Honestly, when you look at it this way, I think there's a certain beauty in the idea that this little, beloved detail may not have even been what Mary would have wanted us to remember.  That God can take even the insignificant things we do and make them into something exquisite and meaningful.  Especially something as messy as giving birth in a stable.