The American ideal of Christmastime includes a very heavy emphasis on spending time with one's family, which ideally should involve lots of food, presents, and love. Which is a pretty great way to spend any day or season of the year, if you can swing it!
But it's almost the exact opposite of what the original, Biblical Christmas was all about.
Mary was about to give birth, she and Joseph were barely married, and the Roman governor declared that every family had to visit the town of the patriarch's family's origin, in order to be registered for taxes. So the two of them traveled the 85 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem, where Joseph's family was originally from. Whether she walked or rode on a donkey, neither was ideal for poor Mary, who was about to have her first child any day now.
But when they arrived, either they must have discovered that Joseph no longer had any family in town who knew him, or whatever family he had left there didn't value him that much. Ancient Israel, whatever your childhood nativity play might have said, didn't have many or possibly any inns, and if there was one in Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary didn't stay there. Mostly when you traveled, you stayed with whoever in town would take you in. Which, since the culture put such a dire emphasis on the importance of hospitality, wasn't usually a problem. The better-off families in any given town were especially expected to put up any strangers who came through, it was part of what being wealthy was all about.
What that word we often read as "inn" actually translates to from the Greek is the human-occupied part of a home, generally the upstairs. While the downstairs was generally reserved for any livestock the family had, a "stable." Whether Joseph & Mary were staying with people he was related to or not, those folks decided against letting a young woman who was about to give birth for the first time, stay in their home, and instead relegated her & Joseph to the stable. Perhaps technically meeting the requirements of hospitality by not actually throwing them into the street, but not very generous of them, all the same.
And I don't mean that in an antisemitic way. These people were almost certainly Jewish, but so were most people in ancient Israel. Jesus disagreed with plenty of Jewish people, sure, but those were 95% of the people he had to talk to at all. Who else was he going to talk to, or about? Every community and religion has people in it like this, people who would offer the bare minimum to a family in this situation. That's a statement on human nature, rather than on any one religion or culture.
Now if everybody was getting registered at once, there would have been a lot of folks traveling. It's very possible that those who could stay at home for the registration because they lived in the place they were from, were all putting up a lot of guests. But who exactly needs to not be sleeping with the livestock, more than the young woman about to give birth? Especially once her labor starts? Which travelers already staying there, don't give up their space for her?
So Joseph's life has been upended, with the sudden need for travel and the arrival of a baby a little sooner than he'd originally planned on, who both is and is not his own. Mary's experiencing childbirth for the first time, not surrounded by family and friends like she was supposed to, but among livestock in a town far from her home. And soon enough they will be refugees on the way to Egypt, even if they didn't know that yet on that first Christmas morning.
But instead of commemorating a long, miserable trip at the command of a tyrant followed by a less-than-warm welcome and a very memorable & probably lonely first experience of childbirth with onlooking livestock, America has insisted that Christmas is about family, food, presents, and just the right set of décor.
So if you're far from loving family this Christmas? Or if "family" and "loving" don't go together much in your world?
If you're actually in physical pain and putting up with miserable circumstances?
If you hoping desperately for things to change because you're not sure how much more you can deal with?
If you've got few or no presents to open and the food is pretty dismal as well?
You're in pretty good company, because the Holy Family themselves are right there with you. And maybe it's time for us to stop worshiping "family" as an ideal at all (and long past time to give up on consumerism). Instead let's remember that the real Christmas story emphasizes the importance of caring for the vulnerable, providing necessary medical care to those in need, and the importance of generous hospitality.
(The Victorian emphasis on ghost stories is strictly optional, but some may enjoy!)
And if you wake up on December 25th and it all looks pretty lackluster, I hope that a local congregation has a worship service you can attend, and they welcome you with open arms and all the love you could ask for.
For those having a very Mary Christmas, may God bless us, every one.
