A Different Kind of Christmas

Messy Genealogies, Grimy Mangers, and the Unexpected Christ

What if Christmas wasn’t polished and perfect?

What if the magic wasn’t in the music, the matching pajamas, or the manicured nativity scene, but in the mess: the real, gritty, sacred mess of our lives?

I’ve spent years trying to find my way back to the wonder I felt as a child during this season. But for a long time, I came home exhausted, disoriented, and disconnected. The faith I once carried didn’t fit the way it used to. And the holiday I used to love felt more like pressure than peace.

This year, I’m returning to the house I grew up in. Not as a guest, but as the one who now calls it home. It’s still in transition. So am I.

In this long-form Christmas reflection, I turn to the three of the gospels (Matthew, Luke, and John) to ask not what Christmas demands of us, but what it offers. How it meets us in our grief, our questions, our half-decorated homes and unresolved stories. From ancient genealogies and crowded family rooms to winter solstice rituals and messy living rooms, this is a post for those trying to stay human in a season that often forgets what that means.

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The Whole Story

When I was a kid, I loved Christmas. Not in the forced “Jesus is the reason for the season” kind of way, but in the real sense of wonder. I loved the smell of pine and the flicker of lights. I loved setting up the nativity and lying on the floor to stare at the tree late at night. I loved the carols, the buildup, the way the whole world felt like it was leaning toward something. Well, I never would have used this word at the time, but sacred.

But somewhere along the way, that magic faded.

When Wonder Wandered

In college, the weeks leading up to Christmas were a sprint. Exams, papers, and the constant pressure to perform left me wrung out by the time I got home. And even though I was back with family, I didn’t feel connected. I was tired. Disoriented. Like a plant ripped from its soil mid-season, roots exposed to cold air.

After undergrad, I stepped into church work as a youth pastor. Christmas became a job. And while I poured everything I had into helping others experience the season, I often felt completely alone in it. I didn’t have family traditions of my own, no shared rituals that grounded me. Just long nights, empty rooms, and the quiet ache that I was helping others celebrate something I no longer felt.

By the time marriage and family entered the picture, I was out of seminary and working as an urban missionary. Our community didn’t hold Sunday services, so I spent most weekends preaching at churches in pastoral transition. During the holidays, everything doubled. More services to lead, more sermons to write, more expectations to manage. I still remember the year I preached two Christmas Eve services and one on Christmas morning, at three different churches, each requiring a different sermon. Three messages in sixteen hours. When it ended, I didn’t feel festive. I just felt hollowed out, like a tree struck by lightning, still standing but burned through the center.

Even after leaving ministry, the season still feels complicated. I wrestle with the faith I was given and the faith I now try to live. The old theology doesn’t hold me anymore, but there are times when the new one still feels tender, like something I’m learning to trust one slow breath at a time. Like winter soil softening toward spring, but not there yet. The lights go up, the songs return, but I’m not always sure how to enter in.

And beyond faith, there’s the cultural machinery of the season. The pressure to bake the cookies, hang the lights, host the parties, wrap the presents, and post the perfect picture. It’s the story our culture tells about what the season should look like. Joy, beauty, family, tradition. And when your life doesn’t match that story, the silence becomes deafening. The grief gets louder. The gap between what you’re told to feel and what you actually feel grows harder to cross.

As a funeral officiant, I’ve seen how this season brings those fault lines to the surface. December is not just Advent and anticipation. It’s also increased funerals. It’s the weight of empty chairs around the table. It’s suicide rates ticking upward. It’s the quiet unraveling of people who feel like they’re the only ones not caught up in the magic. We don’t talk about that in the carols. We don’t name it in the Instagram posts. But it’s there. Real as winter darkness closing in at four thirty in the afternoon.

The Question I’m Asking

So when I ask if there’s still a way to rediscover Christ in Christmas, I’m not asking as a theologian looking for doctrinal clarity. Nor am I echoing what we hear from some Christians who tell us we need to put Christ back in Christmas or insist on saying Merry Christmas rather than Happy Holidays.

I’m asking as a human who wants to make it through the season without losing my soul. I’m asking for myself. And for the tired, the grieving, the disconnected, the doubting. I’m asking if there’s a story that can hold us too. And as someone who has received so much from faith, not from the Christless Christianity of America, but from an ancient collection of stories that center around God putting on skin, it makes me wonder: What would it mean to actually rediscover Christ in Christmas?

Not as a slogan. Not as a childhood memory. Not as a theological idea. But as a presence that still enters the world through vulnerability, through longing, through people who are tired and still searching for light. Moreover, how might rediscovering Christ, whether seen as the historical man or something more mythological, be a path to staying human during the holiday season?

The Christian liturgical season of Advent begins now. Four weeks to wait. Four weeks to prepare. Four weeks to remember that Christ does not arrive in perfection, but in the middle of everything. In the mess. In the waiting. In the dark soil of winter where seeds dream of spring. Could it be that the Gospels, the different stories about the person and life of Jesus, can help us find a different kind of Christmas story?

The Mess and Magi of Matthew

With that question pulsing, let’s start with Matthew, the first book of the Christian New Testament. Now, if you’re looking for a grand opening to the Christmas story, something cinematic and full of magic, Matthew doesn’t give it to you. There’s no angel choir. No animals breathing gently on a sleeping baby. No snow-dusted fields or flickering candles. No manger. No shepherds, at least not in this telling.

Matthew opens with a genealogy. A long one. The kind of passage most people skim past to get to the good stuff. But this is the good stuff. Or at least, it’s the real stuff.

It reads like a legal document. A family tree stretching from Abraham to David to the exile to Jesus. But pay attention to who’s listed. This isn’t a polished record of saints and heroes. It is a lineage filled with wreckage.

Tamar shows up, the woman who dressed as a prostitute to seduce her father-in-law after he refused to provide for her. Then there’s Rahab, the Canaanite sex worker who helped Israel’s spies escape and ended up woven into the line of the Messiah. Ruth, a Moabite widow, crossed cultural and religious boundaries out of loyalty. Bathsheba, named only as “the wife of Uriah,” reminds us of David’s abuse of power and the violent cover-up that followed. The line goes through kings who were faithful and kings who were monsters. The genealogy doesn’t hide any of it. And Matthew does not explain it away.

This is the ancestry of Emmanuel. God with us. Not God above us, or beyond us, or God with the nice and neat. God tangled in generational dysfunction. God entangled in scandal. God emerging from the long story of human fracture. Moreover, it’s not a bug in the system. It’s the whole point. This is the bloodline of God-with-us. Christ comes through it, not around it.

So if you’re staring down this season and feeling like your life doesn’t line up with the glittering photos, the Pinterest-perfect trees, or the expectations you can’t seem to meet, this part of Matthew is for you. If you’re carrying family fractures, financial stress, mental health struggles, or just an aching disconnect between how you thought life would feel and how it actually does, take a breath.

Because Matthew begins the story not with triumph or magic, but with tension and wreckage. Not with purity, but with people whose stories were stained and still called sacred.

Christ does not show up in spite of the mess. He shows up through it. So do not count yourself out. You do not need to clean up your life before something holy can grow from it. This season does not ask for perfection. It asks for presence. Your honesty. Your hunger. Your cracked and open heart. That is where the story has always taken root. Not in palaces. Not in stability. In vulnerability. In the wreckage. In lives just like yours.

But Matthew doesn’t stop there. Because after the genealogy, we get the birth. Joseph, confused and wounded, learns the child growing in Mary is of the Spirit. They stay together, naming the boy Jesus, “the one who saves.” And then, at some unknown distance of time, the Magi, the wisemen, show up.

In our modern nativity scenes, we always jam the wise men and the shepherds together, even though they come from different Gospels and very different directions. The shepherds belong to Luke’s telling, arriving poor and local, unshaven and unclean, startled by angels and stumbling toward the newborn in the night. The Magi, in contrast, come from Matthew’s version. They arrive much later, after Jesus is no longer an infant. But we keep them in our nativity sets anyway. Maybe because something in us needs the whole picture.

And here’s where Matthew doubles down on his original theme. Not only does Jesus come from a family full of outsiders. He is recognized first by outsiders, too.

The Magi were astrologers, not prophets. Foreigners, not Jews. From the East, not from the land of promise. They tracked stars, not scriptures. They show up asking, “Where is the child born king of the Jews?” not because they studied Torah, but because they watched the sky.

They should have been the last people to see what was happening. But they saw. They followed wonder. They followed longing. They followed a thread of meaning that didn’t come through a synagogue or a sermon, but through the cosmos itself.

They brought gifts, but also disruption. Their arrival tipped off Herod and unleashed a wave of fear and violence. Children were killed. Families fled. The Holy Family became refugees, running for their lives. The arrival of Christ was not all is calm, all is bright. It was trembling and terror and flight into the night.

So when Matthew tells us that Christ is born into this world, this is what he means. Christ comes through scandal, and he is recognized from the margins. Not by priests. Not by political elites. Not by the ones who had the right answers. But by those on the edge of the story.

The sexually scandalized. The ethnically excluded. The religiously impure. The ones with dirty hands and strange beliefs and questions that don’t have neat answers. The ones who are simply paying attention, even if they do not know what they are seeing. That is who Christ comes from. That is who Christ comes for. That is who sees him first.

Which means if you find yourself outside the usual Christmas frame this year, you may be right where you need to be. If you are exhausted, disconnected, or still holding your faith together with spiritual duct tape, you may be closer to the Christ of Matthew than those who show up polished and certain.

This is not a Christ who fits in the box. This is not a Christ who rewards religious purity. This is not a Christ who crowns the powerful.

This is a Christ who sees you when you’ve been shut out. A Christ who comes through your wreckage. A Christ who welcomes you even when you’re not sure what you believe anymore. A Christ who keeps showing up, even if you don’t recognize the light at first.

The Mute Mark

Now, if you’re flipping through a Bible at home, double checking what I say, when you come to the next Gospel, Mark, you’ll see that he skips the birth story entirely. No manger. No magi. No angels or shepherds or stars in the sky. Mark begins with a grown man in the wilderness. Maybe that’s its own kind of invitation. A reminder that the good news does not depend on childhood nostalgia or holiday perfection. Maybe Mark knows that for some of us, the beginning isn’t soft and sweet. It’s wild. Raw. Loud with the voice of someone crying out in the desert.

Luke: The Story We Thought We Knew

In stark contrast with Mark’s silence, Luke gives us the story we’re familiar with. And not just in churches. Luke’s version is the one that shows up in movies, on greeting cards, even in Charlie Brown’s Christmas special. This is the version we think we know. Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem. No room at the inn. A manger. Swaddling clothes. Shepherds in the field. Angels announcing good news of great joy. It’s the most iconic and cinematic version we have.

Which is why we need to say it clearly: the Christmas story we think we know and the one Luke actually tells are not the same thing.

We imagine a young couple turned away from hotels, giving birth alone in a barn. But that’s not what the story says. The word we translate as “inn” more accurately refers to a guest room, likely in the home of extended family. There’s no evidence of isolation. On the contrary, it’s hospitality. Community. A first-century home where animals were kept on the lower level during the night for warmth and safety. Where guests stayed upstairs. Where the manger wasn’t in some detached stable, but built into the very floor of the home.

This story is not about rejection. It’s about presence.

Yes, there is lowliness. Yes, there is tension. But Luke’s telling is grounded in connection, not alienation. It’s a story of God showing up in the middle of a family gathering, in a space that’s already full, and still making room for what is holy.

And who shows up first? Not the priests. Not the socially accepted. Not the religious elite. But shepherds. Men on the edges of society, mistrusted and mostly invisible. The very ones whose testimony wasn’t even valid in court are the first to testify to the arrival of Christ. Luke gives the angelic announcement not to the powerful, but to the overlooked. And that, too, is the point.

This isn’t a story of perfection. It’s a story of showing up.

So if this season is pushing you to perform joy, to display a picture-perfect life, to hold your pain behind a smile, maybe Luke has another invitation. Maybe Christmas isn’t about getting everything right. Maybe it’s about being present. About staying open when life is hard. About choosing, again and again, to be with one another. Not in some performative version of love, but in the mess of real life.

Because in Luke’s version, Christ doesn’t arrive as a royal proclamation or a sanitized spectacle. Christ arrives in the warmth of a crowded home. In the exhaustion of labor. In the presence of animals and family and outsiders who are paying attention. That’s what makes it holy.

So if your family looks more chaotic than curated this year, if your life is too full or too fractured to match the Christmas cards and curated posts, you might be closer to the real story than you think. This isn’t about escape. It’s about incarnation. About God showing up not in spite of our lives, but right in the middle of them. And that changes everything.

All that said, even if the Jesus of Matthew, the one who comes from a lineage of deception and dysfunction, speaks to you. Or if the Jesus of Luke, the one born into ordinary hospitality where you’re welcomed just as you are, even if it means sleeping on a cot in the kitchen, feels like home. You may still have been told this story isn’t for you.

Maybe your background doesn’t match the theology. Perhaps your questions pushed you to the margins. Then again, it’s possible the routines and rituals of faith didn’t align with your soul. Whatever the case, you were made to believe that this story couldn’t belong to you. And that’s where John comes in.

John and the Cosmic Christ

Because John doesn’t begin with a manger or a miracle birth. He starts before time. Before Bethlehem. Before Mary or Joseph or the Magi. He starts with the Word. The Logos. The pulse of sacred wisdom running through everything that has ever existed. Not confined to one people. Not locked inside one religion. Not owned by one tradition.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And this Word became flesh and lived among us.

It’s a bold move. John doesn’t root Jesus in genealogy like Matthew. He doesn’t ground him in a historical setting like Luke. He lifts our eyes to the cosmic. And from there, we begin to see: this story is not about exclusivity. It’s not about drawing lines. It’s about tearing them down.

John tells us that Christ is the light that gives light to everyone. Everyone. Not just the religious. Not just those with tidy lives. Not just those who say the right prayers or hold the right doctrines. This is a story wide enough to hold your grief, your questions, your longing, your past.

A story big enough to include Melchizedek, the priest-king who shows up in Genesis without origin or lineage, and later becomes the blueprint for Christ’s priesthood. A story open enough to honor Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, a Midianite priest who worships the Divine in his own tradition and still becomes a trusted spiritual guide. This is not a story that tries to erase the wisdom found outside its pages. It is a story that reveals how divine wisdom has always been at work everywhere.

The Word was in the beginning, and that means the Word was already pulsing through every tribe and tongue. Already stirring in the hearts of sages and seekers. Already whispering in languages not written in Hebrew or Greek.

So when the Magi arrive in Matthew’s Gospel, following stars instead of scriptures, we’re seeing John’s vision come to life. They do not belong to the tradition. But they see. Because the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

Not even the darkness of exclusion. Not even the darkness of gatekeeping. Not even the darkness of our own fears that we will never belong.

So if you’ve been told that this story isn’t yours, John disagrees. If you’ve been made to feel like you need to earn your way in, John invites you to let that burden go.

This is not about earning. It’s about receiving. The Word became flesh and lived among us. Not just once. Not just there. Not just then. Still now.

In every moment you choose to show up with honesty. In every act of compassion. In every whisper of beauty or ache for something more. The Word still arrives.

And when it does, it carries the light of a love that always included you. Before the story started. Before the page turned. Before anyone told you otherwise.

Where Will Christmas Find You?

So what does all this mean today? What does it mean for me? For you?

This Christmas, I am back in the house I grew up in. The one filled with childhood memories and the echoes of college breaks, when I returned exhausted from finals with a semester’s worth of sleep debt in my bones. I used to step through the door hoping to feel held by the magic I remembered. The lights. The warmth. The baking. The laughter. But more often than not, I felt detached, as if I were showing up late to a party I used to belong to.

Now, three decades later, I live here. The house is not what it once was, and neither am I. My dad is gone. My mom grieves in a senior living center ten minutes down the road, carrying the weight of his absence. The rooms echo differently now. I have begun to shape parts of the space into something that feels like mine. An office. A bedroom. A living area curated just enough to function. Yet so much remains unsettled. There are closets I have not touched. Cabinets filled with memories I have not yet claimed or released. A whole front room that holds more of the past than it offers welcome to the future.

Maybe Matthew’s Christmas genealogy is reminding me that all of this belongs. That long list of names is not polished or pristine. It is raw and gritty and filled with people most churches would rather not mention. Maybe this house, in its unfinished and in between state, belongs in that same lineage. Not as a shrine to what used to be. Not as a perfectly styled holiday space. But as a real place. A place where grief and becoming live side by side. A place where Christ might still be born.

In the midst of all this, I find myself drawn to something like the hospitality we see in Luke. The nativity was not isolated in the cold or tucked away from community. It took place in the crowded front room of a family home. Space was tight. A cot was likely close to the kitchen. It was not serene or silent or aesthetically pleasing, but it was full of life. That feels like this season. And it’s what I’d like this how to feel like. I am not a natural host, but I want this to be a place where people are welcomed. A place where belonging does not require performance. A place where presence matters more than polish.

This is especially true with my mom. She knows every creak in the floorboards and every inch of drywall, yet the house no longer feels like hers. The mix of familiar and foreign shows up in her eyes every time she walks through the door. So I try to offer something steady. Not answers. Not distractions. Simply steadiness. It is slow work. Quiet work. But it feels like the kind of work the Christmas story invites.

While Matthew and Luke have me thinking about people and place, John feels like an invitation to new rhythms and routines. His cosmic approach has me paying closer attention to the season itself. Not just the church calendar or the cultural to-do list, but the season as it’s written in the sky. The Winter solstice arrives just before Christmas. The darkest day of the year. The longest night. And it is right there, in the cold and the stillness, that the turning begins. The light starts to return. Slowly. Imperceptibly. But faithfully. This, too, is part of the story.

So one of the things I am exploring this year is whether winter solstice might serve as a kind of threshold for me. A moment to pause. To honor the darkness, not with fear or avoidance, but with quiet reverence. To mark the slow return of light with practices that root me in creation and remind me of rhythms older than religion.

The truth is, some of the traditions we’ve come to associate with Christmas (like trees, wreaths, and candles) trace their lineage back to solstice celebrations. I used to treat that like a theological threat, something to downplay or correct. Now, I wonder if it’s an invitation. Maybe this is part of what John means when he says the true light gives light to everyone. Not to some. Not only to those inside the lines. But to everyone.

The light has always been arriving. The wisdom has always been speaking. The invitation has always been unfolding.

Maybe staying human this Christmas means trusting that whatever is sacred does not need to be protected by exclusivity. Maybe it means honoring the quiet return of light. Not with spectacle. But with presence. With breath. With a candle lit on the longest night. With a whispered prayer that does not ask for answers, only light enough to take the next step.

I wish I could say that writing all this helped me find the magic again. That I feel Christ in Christmas in some new and radiant way. But that wouldn’t be honest.

What I feel is more like a small stirring. A quieting. A sense that I don’t need to chase the feeling, or replicate some past perfection, or make everything just right. Maybe it’s enough to let the story hold me. Maybe it’s enough to believe that God shows up not in the ideal, but in the in-between. In a cluttered house. In a tired body. In the slow clearing of old rooms. In grief that still lingers. In hope that flickers, but has not gone out.

Maybe that’s what staying human in this season looks like. Not mastering the moment. But letting the moment be what it is. Letting it be messy. Letting it be sacred. Letting it be enough.

So if you’re coming to this season feeling like you’re too much or not enough, if you don’t know where you belong or what you believe, if the noise is loud and your heart is tired, know this: You are not outside the story. There is room here. For grief and gratitude. For questions and quiet. For family and solitude. For tangled histories and new beginnings. The light is returning. Slowly. Quietly. Faithfully.

And that, somehow, is still good news. And embracing it, is part of how we stay human.

Embodiment Practices

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.