Mary was only a few days pregnant when she met up with Elizabeth, who was then six months pregnant (Luke 1:39). And this baby, to be named John the Baptist, at six months gestation, leapt for joy in the presence of the fully God, fully human, Son of God who was at that moment only a few days old.

But not all was joy. Indeed along with the incarnation, there was the slaughter of many innocent children. Herod “killed all the male children in Bethlehem… who were two years old or under…Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more” (Mt 2: 16-18). A whole village of sons slaughtered. A whole village of mothers left inconsolable in their grief.

It is important that you understand that behind our many joyful stories of babies saved and born, we are quietly, tearfully, painfully enduring losses too. Sometimes the pain is particularly brutal to bear─which is why we call this work cross-bearing for the child-bearing.

Two weeks ago, a woman came into our center in Miami and received an ultrasound. That is not unusual anymore. What was unique about this one is that the baby was confirmed to be 6 months along; the same age when John the Baptist met Jesus and worshiped Him, womb to womb! Through the ultrasound we saw a little boy fully formed and clearly visible right down to his toes and eyelashes─ a masterpiece of God. We smiled at him, talked to him, photographed him and pledged to help his mother.

This week we confirmed that this little boy was slaughtered, dismembered and discarded by one of our local Miami abortionists. The news struck like a punch in the stomach.

December 26th. No one ever talks about that date: 360th day of the year; day the Erie Canal opened in 1825; birthday of the unfortunate 1/365th of the world’s population; day Babe Ruth was sold to the Yankees in 1919. (Hmm, that should have told us something.)

My gripe with December 26th is nothing that happens, but about what conspicuously does not happen — Christmas music. I trust it has not escaped your notice that the songs all come to a screeching halt that day. No face-saving tapering off to a trickle till the tap be tightly turned on New Year’s night; I’m talking about cold turkey, pardon the pun.

Now by December 26th, mind you, I have had surfeit of figgy pudding and Jingle Bells like the next person, having been force fed since the morning after Halloween. No, cessation is not my problem. It is the manner of cessation that continues to be, each year, the occasion of acute embarrassment — the fact that the deed isn’t done a bit more gradually and tastefully, so as to not make it patently obvious that the strafe bombing of airways and malls had been cynical marketing manipulation.

December 25th is a good time, but December 26th feels like betrayal, like I’ve been had, like I’m Charlie Brown fallen the umpteenth time for Lucy’s promise to hold the football steady while I run for a kick.

I’m just glad Jesus still loves me the morning after.

Some years ago I heard a term for those people who swell churches on special events like Christmas and Easter: Creasters. It was uttered with some derision, which is how I uttered it subsequently, caught up as I was in my new Christian’s sense of moral superiority. The intervening years have taught me, however, the stark difference between debasement and abasement, between the corruption that I have wrought in this often losing battle between spirit and flesh, and the redemption that a humbled Christ brought for the likes of me. We have debased ourselves, and because of this, out of love, Christ abased himself.

Those peaks of the traditional Christian calendar — Christmas and Easter — are the peaks as well of Christ’s humbling. He came weak and poor and hunted, he left on a cross amongst felons. I think about these people we call Creasters, who haven’t the discipline or burden of religiosity to bring them dutifully to church, yet who come nonetheless, to the humbled Christ. They come in jeans or in suits, and they slouch or sit stiffly in strange pews, and they sing hymns with us though they are aware that they do not belong to our community.

It’s easy for me to go to my church, but perhaps not for the Creaster. Sometimes — too often — I come out of habit or duty, but sometimes I come out of the deepest yearning. I wonder if the Creasters feel this, if it is why they come during this season and at Easter. I wonder if they, in their alien state, don’t come closer to a true heart than I carry most Sundays. They come, though it doesn’t fit their routine. They come, in spite of the discomfort in not belonging. They come because something draws them — a faint sense of holiness evoked by the season, or because we are more inviting, or for the music, or maybe because the baby Christ and the murdered Christ are images they can relate to best in their fear and need. They come, with their doubts and their poor attendance records, and somewhere, most importantly, the hope that it isn’t all just a myth, that the baby was and is Immanuel, God with us. May they, and all of us, see in that birth and death and resurrection a world overcome, and have peace.

For the past few years, my husband and I have participated in an annual tradition at our church of going Christmas caroling to those members who are confined to their homes or nursing homes. Apparently, though, this is a dying tradition.

Do you still go caroling, and if so, what are your favorite songs to sing? After weighing in, have fun testing your abilities to name some classic Christmas carols here.

Ever since my husband and I got married, we’ve chosen to send out a short Christmas newsletter rather than the typical cards. We have always looked forward to receiving such newsletters from our family and friends, especially those we don’t have much contact with throughout the rest of the year. But some people find the newsletters annoying, especially when they are too long, too boastful, and contain way too much information.

How do you feel about receiving Christmas newsletters, and what do you send out?

’Tis the day before Christmas and the high water mark of the Willow Grove Mall parking lot. Today, the fluvial overflow of the holiday tide almost justifies the irrational exuberance of mall designers, as parking spaces up to Easton Road that are never used all year are grabbed with gratitude.

There are many mysteries of mall parking lots, to be sure, such as why they are always the homes of seagulls, no matter how far from the sea. But today’s curiosity is the sight of cars circling like vultures for the closer spots.

With due respect to the late Senator William Proxmire and his “Golden Fleece Awards,” I think parking lot attitude should be the next government-funded study. If the National Science Foundation can fork out $84,000 in 1970s dollars to find out “why people fall in love,” they can darn well look into why people pay to work out at the fitness center and then fight to park closest to Macy’s door so as to avoid walking to the curb.

It now seems the most obvious of solutions to this ulcerous annual tension, but it came as an epiphany at the time, that I can bail out of the games altogether by just heading for the nosebleed section of the macadam right off the bat. What liberation. What Christmas savings on a Bally’s membership.

On his radio show earlier this week, Dr. Albert Mohler fielded questions about the wise men, whether Christmas traditions are biblical, the virgin birth, the meaning of the term “Christmas,” and the Christian response to Santa Claus. It’s a good podcast to listen to while walking the dog or while traveling over the river and through the woods to Grandma’s house. (Just be careful that the little ones aren’t listening during the Santa Claus part!)

Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, won a stocking full of coal this Christmas for providing “the silliest affront to the Christmas and Hannukah holidays.”

Lynn received the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty’s Annual Ebenezer Award for his attack on a church-run program that provided socks and shoes for 1,000 needy children in South Carolina. Lynn’s gripe with the privately-funded Laces4Love: It “subjects disadvantaged students to ritual foot-washing as part of a shoe giveaway.”

Volunteers asked children if they would like to have their feet wiped off before they put on clean socks and new shoes. As Kevin “Seamus” Hasson, president of the Becket Fund (a nonpartisan, interfaith law firm), told WoW, “They’re little kids, so you treat them with a certain amount of maternal kindness and you don’t just hand them the shoebox and say, ‘Here kid, here are your shoes.’” Lynn called the foot-washing “an attempt to evangelize public schools students” and a violation of the Constitution. Both school officials and volunteers said the foot-washing was hygienic, not religious.

Past Ebenezer Award recipients include Sparkle, a large, six-foot tall sparkly star that replaced Pittsburgh’s religious holiday symbols. Kensington, Maryland, took the award for disinviting Santa Claus from its tree lighting ceremony. A high school in Kirkland, Washington, won the lump of coal for canceling a performance of A Christmas Carol.

Hasson said attacks on Christmas and Hannukah are getting “less silly,” but “while Christmas nonsense is down, holiday nonsense is up.” Politically correct police are now targeting Valentine’s Day because it is named for a saint, along with Easter. Students are sending Special Friends cards, and the Easter bunny may have to change his name to the Special Bunny.

Fortunately, as the schools get sillier the Supreme Court gets saner, Hasson said: “By and large, there’s a better atmosphere for religious freedom in the Supreme Court than there has been.”

Two passages from the prison letters of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pastor and theologian executed by the Nazis, stick with me this season:

“From the Christian point of view there is no special problem about Christmas in a prison cell. For many people in this building it will probably be a more sincere and genuine occasion than in places where nothing but the name is kept. That misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness and guilt mean something quite different in the eyes of God from what they mean in the judgment of man, that God will approach where men turn away, that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him at the inn — these are things that a prisoner can understand better than other people; for him they really are glad tidings, and that faith gives him a part in the communion of saints…”

“A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes, does various unessential things, and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.”

Bonhoeffer gives an image of Christ not only as liberator, but as fellow prisoner, as one who opens the prison door and steps inside to suffer with us. How very like God to come in weak and humble flesh, signifying not only that he would bear the suffering of the world by dwelling with man, but that he would dwell in man. How very like us to remove him from the world, through neglect or abstraction.

I read somewhere about modern-day Pilgrims who eschew Christmas celebration, because of its pagan roots, as if any celebration we might devise would be anything but tainted, as if anything touched by the grace-covered hands of those gathered in God’s name could not be made holy. It’s fitting that we celebrate the Advent and birth every year, if only because we once again allow the God we so often make distant to draw near again, to open once more the prison doors we hold fast with our own hands, to ransom captive Israel with himself.