If you take Christmas to heart and get past the anxieties in arranging for gifts and parties, you will rediscover yourself every year at this time and experience a birth in yourself, just like the one so beautifully described in the Gospel stories.

If you don’t have special times in your life that are liminal, that put the ordinary into eclipse, then you are condemned to a dull life of facts and predictability.

People usually think of Christmas as a traditional and sentimental festival, but not as a celebration of the Jesus vision it commemorates: a philosophy of profound reform.

Dark days can mean dark moods. This natural turn of the seasons helps explain the timing of Christmas. It is the festival of light, the return of the sun and longer periods of daylight.

Dark days can mean dark moods. This natural turn of the seasons helps explain the timing of Christmas.

Christmas allows a break from that gray depression, an inner darkness reflected in the winter sky.