Â鶹Éç

Good morning.

Apparently, you can tell a lot about a person by what character they performed in their school nativity play. My elder brother, captain of the cricket and football team and now C.E.O of his own company, was, of course, a King. I was a donkey three years straight. Make of that what you will. It’s doubly annoying now to consider that a donkey might not have even featured in the nativity story at all. There probably wasn’t an inn keeper, or even a stable. The gospels make no reference to any of these things, what we know of as the modern nativity play is a layered account, richly combining truth and myth with tradition.

This has no effect on the children in schools up and down the land, who sit amidst a menagerie of barnyard creatures in a cardboard stable and sing about Mary riding a Little Donkey. Does it matter if nativity plays or scenes aren’t strictly accurate? Jesus wasn’t born amidst bomb damaged debris either, but there’s still something painfully symbolic about the Lutheran church in Bethlehem who this year have placed their baby Jesus in the rubble of a destroyed building. It’s a poignant fragment of theology, which silently declares: God is with all those who suffer. Thousands of small children will this week re-enact this most timeless of all tales, and even if the details aren’t exactly as they were, one detail remains true: Christ is still in the manger, swaddled like a gift, waiting to be unwrapped.

Accuracy doesn’t seem to be important when I’m sitting in a hall so hot I’m sweating, my bottom squashed into a tiny plastic chair, craning my head to see my child give the best ever performance of a sheep that there ever was. I can barely hear him over the screams of the baby two rows back, nor see him through the iPad being held aloft by a 6ft dad blocking my view.

And yet…I can just about see a tiny Mary, cradling a plastic Jesus, her face alight with utter pride and wonder, and I feel again the enchantment of God. This touching, innocent retelling of the birth of Jesus renews my faith like no theology textbook has ever done. I come away feeling like it really is the most special story ever told and that’s why I never tire of hearing it.

The disconnect between this and the thought of another baby Jesus, lying amidst the rubble, is keenly felt, but binding them both together is the promise that Christmas still has the power to keep: a pledge of hope and a whisper of peace.

Show less