As I look back through my childhood Christmas memories, the birth of Jesus with all of its amazing details was a difficult concept to grasp. I tried to put the Christmas story into practical terms, in an effort to wrap my brain around it and have it make sense. How did this baby’s birth manage to turn the world upside down?

I knew the biblical story of the birth of Jesus, but I wondered if I had been around at that time, would I have followed the star to the manger, too?

My whole concept of Jesus was framed by a tendency to put Jesus into a tidy little box, and set Him over there, until I decided that I needed a little help. Sort of like the manger scene that I took out of tis box each Christmas season to set up on the fireplace mantle; once the holidays passed, away it went back into its box until next year.

With this in mind, I remember going to the annual Christmas Eve Service at our little church in a pre-Revolutionary War town in New Jersey. The church would be chilly and I would wonder at the thought of Jesus being born on a cold night, and in a stable no less. I was fortunate to have a horse of my own, and I knew what it was like to go to the stable on a freezing December night. A pregnant woman riding on a donkey into Bethlehem, and the whole virgin birth thing were totally beyond my comprehension. The idea of Mary giving birth in a stable and then having to lay her delicate newborn son (and the King of Kings no less) into a manger of hay seemed unfathomable. Swadding clothes or not, I happened to know from experience that dry, scratchy hay was an uncomfortable place to sit for any length of time!

It also so happened that I had a donkey as a child, chosen to be the donkey for Mary to ride to the manger scene in the local Christmas Pageant, presented a few days before Christmas. Eeyore, not being anointed with the patience and good manners of the blessed donkey that Mary rode into Bethlehem bucked off the acting Mary and charged down the middle of the road in the direction of his own stable and manger full of hay. I being the Angel Gabrielle, and the owner of the rebellious donkey, tossed off my wings and set after him, tripping on my over-sized white choir robe and losing my halo as I ran! While Mary and Joseph nursed their wounded pride, the local sheriff, and a few kind onlookers helped me round up Eeyore, and take him back home.

My Christmas pageant experience only served to make the biblical story of Jesus even more amazing and more difficult to perceive. If there had been an unruly donkey carrying Mary on the way to Bethlehem that blessed night, who knows how things would have wound up for Mary and Joseph! Would the star of Bethlehem been darting all over the sky in order to locate where Mary had been dumped by the uncooperative donkey, so it could then mark the site where Jesus was to be born? These questions plagued my mind.

However, as one Christmas led to another, I came to understand that the Christmas story and all of the miraculous aspects of Jesus’ life and teaching cannot be placed in a box and put away like the manger scene each year. No rebellious donkey could have fouled up the Nativity; nor would the star of Bethlehem have had any trouble locating the place where Jesus was to be born. Why?

As a child I did not take into account a rather important piece of information: God had a plan! As scriptures further reveal, the manger scene bursts out of its Christmas box to reveal the eventual death and resurrection of Jesus, and therefore, life everlasting for those who believe. So, as I put the Nativity scene back into its Christmas box for next year, I will remind myself that things are not always what they seem. Just like all of the miraculous events of the first Christmas, God’s plans for me and for you, cannot be contained by the confines of the Christmas Box.

Debbie Meece
12-16-07