Christmas

Authorized by narratives in two of the Gospel books of the Christian Bible, Matthew and Luke, and providing a prequel to New Testament Christology, Christmas celebrates the coming of God to earth through the birth of Jesus Christ. It is Christianity's second greatest festival, after Easter, and during this season the Church becomes a theater of incarnation. The apostle Paul claimed that Christ born in Bethlehem can still be located on earth: The Church as the body of Christ is the continuing extension of the incarnation.

A full account of Christmas requires a theological ear for what is irreducibly religious but also a sociological imagination for its holy day/holiday presence in lived Christianity, where the categories [Page 217]of sacred and profane are continuously scrambled, and an ...