We are soon approaching a refined holiday, 'Merry Mas,' where Christ will be taken out of its context.

From a theological point of view, Easter is the center of the Church year; but Christmas is the most profoundly human feast of faith, because it allows us to feel most deeply the humanity of God. The crib has a unique power to show us what it means to say that God wished to be “Immanuel”—a “God with us”, a God whom we may address in intimate language, because he encounters us as a child.

So now we pause. Still. Ponder. Hush. Wait. Each day of Advent, He gives you the gift of time, so you have time to be still and wait. Wait for the coming of the God in the manger who makes Himself bread for us near starved. For the Savior in swaddlings who makes Himself the robe of righteousness for us worn out. For Jesus, who makes precisely what none of us can but all of us want: Christmas.

No Santa Claus! Thank God he lives and he lives forever. A thousand years from now Virginia nay ten times ten thousand years from now he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

God did not enter the world of our nostalgic, silent-night, snow-blanketed, peace-on-earth, suspended reality of  Christmas. God slipped into the vulnerability of skin and entered our violent and disturbing world.

Christmas is the spirit of love, peace and goodwill to all Humankind. It is within the reach of every heart and hand.

We must look to Mary's example to know how to deal with the glorious impossibilities of God. Look how she turned the world upside down by making one simple statement ...

Let him into the mire and muck of our world. For only if we let him in can he pull us out.

Christmas united us as holy beings. We experience love, joy and peace.

In another Christmas story, Dale Pearson, evil developer, self-absorbed woman hater, and seemingly unredeemable curmudgeon, might be visited in the night by a series of ghosts who, by showing him bleak visions of Christmas future, past, and present, would bring about in him a change to generosity, kindness, and a general warmth toward his fellow man. But this is not that kind of Christmas story, so here, in not too many pages, someone is going to dispatch the miserable son of a bitch with a shovel. That's the spirit of Christmas yet to come in these parts. Ho, ho, ho.