“Mr. Thatcher, you don’t celebrate holidays?!?”, breathlessly queried a student for the 3rd time that day.

“No, I  mean, we do, it’s just we don’t really do much, you know?” I stammer back.

I joke that would be a fantastic Jehovah’s Witness, in one of those glib stereotypes we use on each other. And yet any holiday effort seems a bridge too far for me. No Christmas gifts, no plans, no yuletide. It confuses the students and baffles my peers (“No really, we’re not getting Ben anything, really, he’ll be just fine, I promise.”).

But that doesn’t mean that Christmas means nothing to me, and in the small chance that some of you who are reading are those most aware of my peculiar holiday peccadilloes let me briefly attempt to explain myself. Far more devout, more thoughtful and creative believers have thoroughly worn with millennia of linguistic devotion the patch of the gospel I attempt to kneel on this morning, but the reality is their devotion isn’t mine and while their words are more dulcet and grand they are not my profession of faith and I can not claim them as my own.

I believe God Himself slid off his princely robe and removed his majestic crown, he laid aside his Jehovah-wrath and, in the greatest contortion of all, slipped into the fragile body of a bound babe (if you’ve never swaddled an infant you are literally and forcefully binding its arms to its sides and legs together: it is as physically helpless and weak a position imaginable). And that pathetic child only presaged a greater condescension yet to come as that weak, but, as all infants, perfect and tender child grew from child to teen to man. As his now awake and aware human brain comprehended the cruel and profane world in which he lived he did not shrink, but touched, healed, loved, ate, laughed, and preached with real men and women who were not you and I. Perhaps we bely our ignorance of what godliness truly acts like and thinks like, but we wonder how one so great, indeed the Greatest One, could tolerant our wars and weakness, our self-pity and profanity and profiteering, but He showed, instead, that Greatness begins in being with people where they’re at, in their squalor, in their ignorance, in their sin. With them — messy, dirty, tired, and confused.

God with us.

In my teenage years my soul was constantly kneeling the empty Cross: Am I clean? Am I saved? Those questions have answers that matter and yet I have come to realize so does the empty manger: Am I really with them? Am I really one of them? For if I am not with you, my sister, my brother, if I am not willing to shake off the Crown of Me with which I reflexly coronate myself daily and learn to be with you as He was, then I have missed what that shivering babe was doing. If the cross means something of purity and compassion, than the manger means something of brotherhood and “withness”.

Me with you.

Merry Christmas, and know in my own way am with you, in thought and in heart.

And it came to pass that I saw the heavens open; and an angel came down and stood before me; and he said unto me: Nephi, what beholdest thou? And I said unto him: A virgin, most beautiful and fair above all other virgins. And he said unto me: Knowest thou the condescension of God? And I said unto him: I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things. And he said unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of the Son of God, after the manner of the flesh. And it came to pass that I beheld that she was carried away in the Spirit; and after she had been carried away in the Spirit for the space of a time the angel spake unto me, saying: Look! And I looked and beheld the virgin again, bearing a child in her arms. And the angel said unto me: Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Son of the Eternal Father! Knowest thou the meaning of the tree which thy father saw? And I answered him, saying: Yea, it is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things. And he spake unto me, saying: Yea, and the most joyous to the soul. And after he had said these words, he said unto me: Look! And I looked, and I beheld the Son of God going forth among the children of men; and I saw many fall down at his feet and worship him.