“Merry Christmas” or “Mary’s Christmas”?

There is one figure in the Christmas story who tends to slip into the background. Have we quietly set her aside?

I grew up Protestant, not Catholic, and yet I keep finding myself drawn to images, symbols, and artwork connected to Mary, the mother of Jesus. Some of these pieces have ended up in my own collection. Others I made myself, as personal works of art. I've read quite a few books about the lives of nuns, the so-called Brides of Christ, and I've spent a lot of time with songs and poems written about the Madonna, the Virgin Mary.

Something I learned along the way surprised me. A good deal of the Lutheran church's music and liturgy, Protestant though that church is, traces back to the Catholic church, since the originals were written in Latin, the Catholic church's language.

Think about who was present at the birth. Alongside God the Father, wasn't Mother Mary one of the central participants in the story of Jesus's arrival? Joseph was Mary's husband. He raised Jesus and acted as his father here on earth, but he was not Jesus's actual father.

We call Jesus the son of God and the son of man. Yet wasn't he also, quite literally, the son of Mary, a woman and a virgin? It is women who do the physical work of bringing children into the world. They carry them from a single fertilized egg through every stage of growth, until a tiny infant is ready to be born and to breathe, eat, and grow on its own.

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