By and large, Christmas is, despite our wholesale (and retail) commercialization of it, still celebrated more in the spirit of its meaning than perhaps any other Christian holy day. Its meaning is woven around a baby born some 1,900 years ago. And the marvel is that we who have been so inured to acknowledging only brute facts are still aware of, and celebrate, that Baby’s meaning.
Like every other baby, He means life: its gift, its pledge—plus something more. Rare is the person whose attention is not arrested by a baby—the inimitable softness, color, and perfume of its skin, the purity of its cry, the appeal of its helpless imperiousness—and who does not find himself automatically borne beyond what senses tell him, into the mysterious heart of humanness and its hope.
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