I’m not going to ask your favourite Christmas story.
It’s probably the same as mine: the gospel story of how God sent his only son to earth, and how he was born in a manger in Bethlehem. Although I suppose you might have a preference for Matthew over Luke. Or vice versa.
I don’t know that Jesus was actually born on 25 December. Odds are, he wasn’t (and if he was, we should celebrate Christmas Day on 6 January, like the Eastern Orthodox Christians have since the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar back in the 1700’s).
It’s not important what day Jesus was born. What is important, as far as I’m concerned, is that we celebrate His birth with our families, with our friends, and with our church fellowships.
That we remember the birth of Jesus as a physical sign of the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.
As we discussed last week, a lot of novels and novellas are set around Christmas. Some are Christian novels, so are able to emphasise the spiritual importance of the occasion. Some are general market novels—isn’t it great that non-believers still chose to celebrate our Christian holy days? Even several of the Harry Potter novels, often maligned by Christians, still have Christmas right at the centre of the novel.
