We tell the stories we need. Not deliberately, and not always consciously, but persistently. Stories endure not because they preserve events with precision, but because they continue to speak to recurring human conditions. The stories that survive are the ones that remain usable—capable of being reshaped without losing coherence, softened without losing gravity, and retold without exhausting their meaning. When a story no longer answers the pressures of a given moment, it recedes. When it continues to answer them, it is carried forward.
Christmas survives for this reason.
As a religious but not spiritual person, I approach Christmas not as a test of belief, but as a story whose endurance invites understanding. To ask how the Christmas story formed, why it took the shape it did, and what needs it addressed is not to diminish it. It is to take it seriously. An honest relationship to the season requires intellectual clarity as much as emotional attentiveness. Understanding origins does not empty a story of meaning; it clarifies what kind of meaning it carries.
The anchor image for this reflection is a Madonna and Child, but not the familiar one. The pair that orients this entry is Elizabeth and John the Baptist. This is the earlier pairing, the one shaped by preparation rather than arrival, by inheritance rather than fulfillment. It is the story that stands behind Christmas, giving it narrative depth before it acquires seasonal warmth.
Elizabeth and John belong to an older scriptural pattern. Their story echoes the Hebrew tradition of delayed birth, long waiting, and restored possibility. John is not born into ease or resolution. He is born into expectation. His life is oriented toward responsibility from the beginning, shaped by urgency and demand rather than reassurance. Elizabeth does not present her child as a solution to the world’s problems, but as a response to something already out of alignment. This is a story about readiness, not rescue.
Historically and literarily, John stands before Jesus. He is not a marginal figure awaiting replacement, but an independent prophetic presence with his own movement, authority, and following. The earliest Christian Gospel, Gospel of Mark, begins not with a birth, but at the river. Jesus enters the story already framed by John’s work. He submits to John’s baptism, an act that later traditions struggle to explain away precisely because it suggests subordination rather than supremacy. From a historical perspective, this discomfort is revealing. Traditions tend to preserve what they cannot easily erase.
My working assumption is that Jesus began his public life as a follower, perhaps even a disciple, of John, shaped by John’s message of urgency, repentance, and imminent change. After John’s arrest and execution, Jesus continues a closely related proclamation, carrying forward its core demands while gradually reframing its tone. This reads less like rupture than succession. Jesus does not replace John so much as inherit and extend his work.
The problem arises later, after Jesus’ own execution. John was widely known and feared by authorities; Jesus was executed as a marginal figure. For Jesus’ followers, succession alone was not enough to sustain the movement. Authority needed to be secured more deeply, anchored not only in proclamation or continuation, but in origin itself. This is where narrative adaptation becomes visible.
The birth stories appear late in the tradition. Mark contains none. It is only in later texts, especially the Gospel of Luke, that full infancy narratives emerge, and when they do, they arrive doubled. John’s conception and birth are narrated first, in language deeply rooted in Israel’s past. Jesus’ birth follows the same narrative grammar: annunciation mirrors annunciation, song answers song, movement responds to movement. The structure suggests adaptation rather than independent memory. John’s story establishes the pattern; Jesus’ story inherits it.
Read this way, the Jesus nativity is not an original beginning, but a relocation of authority. What had once been grounded in preparation and succession is transferred backward into origin. This is not deception. It is how religious traditions stabilize meaning under pressure. When urgency alone becomes unsustainable, stories shift. They do not abandon what came before; they absorb it.
This is why the Madonna and Child image widens rather than narrows when read carefully. Mary and Jesus are not a replacement for Elizabeth and John, but an adaptation of their story. The earlier pair speaks the language of preparation and demand; the later pair speaks the language of orientation and care. Together they form a single narrative arc capable of endurance. The story softens not because it has weakened, but because it must carry itself longer.
Christmas, then, is not a denial of John’s urgency. It is a response to it. Where preparation confronts, Christmas holds. Where repentance demands action, Christmas invites attention. The shift is not theological sleight of hand; it is narrative necessity. Communities cannot live indefinitely under pressure. Eventually, they require a story that teaches how to remain human when certainty is thin and the future unclear.
This is what the Christmas story continues to do. It tells us something about beginnings when endings feel heavy. It offers orientation when resolution is unavailable. Its power lies not in its immunity from history, but in its formation within it. The story survives because it learned how to speak differently when speaking the same way was no longer enough.
For me, this understanding deepens rather than diminishes the season. To approach Christmas religiously, without spiritual claims, is to listen for how the story was shaped and why it endured. Elizabeth and John restore gravity to the narrative. Mary and Jesus extend it. Together they reveal Christmas not as a miracle dropped into history, but as a human story adapted with care.
We tell the stories we need. The ones we need most are the ones that survive. Christmas survives because it continues to say something worth hearing. It says something about preparation and care, urgency and holding, and the ways meaning is carried forward when belief alone is not enough.
Merry Christmas, 2025.