Merry Christmas

"It seems, then," said Tirian, smiling himself, "that the stable seen within and the stable seen without are two different places."

"Yes," said the Lord Digory. "Its inside is bigger than its outside."

"Yes, " said Queen Lucy. "In our world too, a stable once had something in it that was bigger than our whole world."

taken from The Last Battle, from The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

and from "Shepherds, Why This Jubilee" by Jeffrey R. Holland

"Jeff, my boy," my Father in Heaven seemed to say with that baby's cry, "I expected a little more from you. If you can't remember why all of this matters, then your approach to Christmas is no more virtuous than the overcommercialization everyone laments these days. You need to shape up just a little, to put your theology where your Christmas carols are. You can't separate Bethlehem from Gethsemane or the hasty flight into Egypt from the slow journey to the summit of Calvary. It's of one piece. It is a single plan. It considers 'the fall and rising again of many in Israel,' but always in that order. Christmas is joyful not because it is a season or decade or lifetime without pain and privation, but precisely because life does hold those moments for us. And that baby, my son, my own beloved and Only Begotten Son in the flesh, born, 'away in a manger, (with) no crib for his bed,' makes all the difference in the world, all the difference in time and eternity, all the difference everywhere, worlds without number, a lot farther than your eye can see."

Merry REAL Christmas to you all.