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Why Christmas Is Just Getting Started
There’s a radio station in our area that starts playing Christmas songs 24-7 on Thanksgiving Day or the day after. The station’s been doing this for several years, providing a soundtrack for the busy holiday season. While I haven’t typically tuned in, this year I did. I remember I was driving southbound on Michigan Street in our city, heading to work. I was at a stoplight, flipping through the radio stations, impatient that most were on commercial. And then I landed on the 24-7 Christmas songs station. They were in the midst of White Christmas, which happens to be not only one of my favorite Christmas songs but also one…
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The Scandal of the Savior’s Birth
We’ve all probably seen a children’s nativity play. But even if you haven’t, you can perhaps imagine the gist. They’re usually a creative conflation of the two different stories we have about Jesus’s birth from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. There’s the setting in a manger at night, of course, with shepherds and angelic choirs, from Luke’s version. There are the Magi — the three wise men from the East — from Matthew’s version, though Matthew reports that the wise men showed up sometime after Jesus was born, not the night of his birth. And there is, of course, Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus, the central characters of…
A Blog by Sam Ochstein.