?Nothing could be more wonderful, moving, and enlightening than the Christmas story itself. I happened to a people who suffered beyond endurance under the Roman rule, with a mad Asmodean Kind tormented by prophecies of his own destruction. Yearning for a Messiah, a leader to freedom and a better way of life, filled all their thoughts and prayers. Then out of Bethlehem came the Nativity, prophetic, mysterious, and unearthly: choirs of angles singing from the skies, a strange radiance on the dark hills; shepherds stunned and speechless as they watched their flocks in the lonely night; Wise Men from afar following an unknown star to pay homage to a Baby born in a manger with a gleaming aureole about his head. All testified to the deep significance of ? the things that are and cannot be.? Until almost two thousand years ago, the greeting at midwinter was, ?I give you light for the year.? About a century after the first Christmas, John, the author of the Fourth Gospel, wrote of Advent in terms of spiritual Light shinning through the world?s darkness. And the greeting gradually became, ?I give you Christ, the Light of the World.??
From the book ?The Light of Christmas?

Rick