The Real Christmas Story

So what is the story behind Christmas, anyway?  The American media has done a pretty decent job of telling the fairy tale side of the story of pregnant Mary and Joseph making their journey to and through Bethlehem for the Roman census (a count of the Roman people that the Emperor wanted conducted in every one's home town).  For some reason, Mary and Joseph arrived a little later than every one else, and the pregnant couple was denied a room inn after inn, home after home.  Eventually, they settled on a manger, where Mary gave birth to baby Jesus; the three wise men came to visit the Christ child bringing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.  The End. Right?

Not really.  All of this is true, but what the dumbed down version of the Christmas story tells us is that a pregnant woman, her husband, and a donkey rode through Bethlehem looking for a place to stay but they settled on a barn, where she had her baby, a rather important historical figure named Jesus Christ.  There is a lot more to the story than that.  For one thing, the children's books don't really let the readers know that the reason the baby Jesus was so important was because had been prophesied and everyone had been expecting him as the Messiah, or the chosen one.  The baby had been immaculately conceived by God, who had planted the seed in the womb of Mary; that is what made Mary so special.  She had been informed of her impregnation by an angel of God, who had assured her that every thing would be okay.

It was on the very last legs of Mary's pregnancy that the Roman Emperor, Augustus, ordered the Roman Census.  After they were continuously denied lodging on a repeated number of occasions, they did eventually settle in a stable.  Baby Jesus was born later that night in a manger, which is a type of feeding trough for farm animals. 

While Jesus Christ was said to have been born on December 25th, it is reputed that the three wise men (or magi) did not come to visit until twelve days later, on the date of the Epiphany July 6.  The Epiphany is celebrated in some countries instead of or in complement to December 24 or December 25.  The wise men were said to travel from the east, and there is a lot of suspicion around who they actually were and the nature of their intentions when they set out to visit the holy infant, but for the sake of the story, these suspicions will not be discussed. 

The magi visited King Herod to confirm a rumor that Jesus had, in fact, been born.  They wanted to know where they could find the child, and so Herod sent them to Bethlehem, and asked that they returned to him when they left the child's side.  They followed the Star of Bethlehem in the east, and it led them right to the manger bed of the baby Jesus, where they presented him with the three gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Sometime between leaving King Herod and arriving at the stable, the three wise men had been warned in a dream by an angel not to return to King Herod, letting them know that he had malicious intentions.  They returned to their home using a different way than they came.  This angered Herod, who then ordered the massacre of all infants in the area, in a failed attempt to kill the child as well.

Christians everywhere celebrate Christmas as a reminder that the birth of Jesus was God’s way of allowing them into a personal relationship with Him. In His life, Jesus would die a cruel death on a cross so that the world’s sins would be forgiven and people everywhere could, through their faith in Jesus, have eternal life in Heaven.