“The basis for this tremendous annual burst of buying things and gift-giving and parties and near hysteria is a quiet event that Christians believe actually happened a long time ago. You can say that in all societies there has always been a mid-winter festival and that many of the trappings of our Christmas are almost violently pagan. But you come back to the central fact of the day in the quietness of Christmas morning – the birth of God on earth.

“It leaves you with only three ways of accepting Christmas. One is cynically – as a time to make money or endorse the making of it or to hope the economy does well. One is graciously – the appropriate attitude for non-Christians in a [largely] Christian society, who wish their fellow citizens all the joys to which their beliefs entitle them. And the third, of course, is reverently. If this is the anniversary of the appearance of the Lord of the universe in the form of a helpless baby, it is a very important day.

“It’s a startling idea, of course, that a virgin was selected by God to bear His Son as a way of showing His love… for man. It’s my guess that in spite of all the lip service they have given it, it is not an idea that has been popular with theologians. It is somewhat illogical and theologians love logic almost as much as they love God.

“It has a magnificent appeal. Almost nobody has seen God and almost nobody has any real idea of what He is like, and the truth is that among men, the idea of seeing God, suddenly and standing in very bright light is not necessarily a completely comfortable and appealing idea.

“But everybody has seen babies and most people like them. If God wanted to be loved as well as feared, He moved correctly here… If God wanted to be intimately a part of man, He moved correctly here, for the experience of birth and [family] is our most intimate and precious experience.

“So it is beyond logic. It is even what Bishop Karl Morgan Block used to call a kind of divine insanity. It is either all falsehood or it is the truest thing in the world. It either rises above the tawdriness of what we make of Christmas or it is [merely our invention] and completely irrelevant. It is a story of the great [gentleness] of God, the baby, God in the power of man. And it is such a dramatic shot toward the heart that if it is not true for Christians, nothing else is, because this story reaches Christians universally and with profound emotion…  If it is false, we are doomed. But if it is true, as it must be, it makes everything else in the world all right.”

Commentary on Christmas, on 60 Minutes, 12-23-79 by Harry Reasoner