“This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.” Matthew 1:18-19

Just as much as he chose Mary to be Jesus’ mother, God chose Joseph to be his father. Scripture tells us that Mary’s conception was miraculous; Joseph was not the biological father. Mary could have raised her son alone, however difficult that was, but God chose two parents for Jesus, both mother and father.

I think God knew he would need the example of a father.

We do not know much about Joseph. Scripture says very little about him. What is it about this man that made God choose him to be Jesus’ daddy? We are offered two clues to his character: the swiftness with which he believes the angel who announces the miraculous news in a dream, but also that before the angel, when he first found out about the pregnancy and (naturally) believed Mary had been unfaithful to him, he wanted to divorce her quietly.

I don’t know about you, but this is startling to me. I have seen friends and family go through divorces and know only a few who choose not to rail against their ex-spouse when given the opportunity. I can imagine the pain and anger I would feel if it happened to me, and I suspect I would vent it to everyone I knew. Joseph believed he had been betrayed by the woman he was going to marry, and yet, in the midst of this hurt, he wanted to spare Mary humiliation. Even in the midst of the pain of seeming betrayal, he showed compassion and concern for the apparent betrayer. Without pretending or tolerating his own mistreatment, he was willing to treat her kindly.

This is the daddy who could raise a son that told the world to love their enemies and “turn the other cheek.” This is the daddy who could teach Jesus that God was a father.

There are still many, many children who need that kind of daddy, whether a natural father or a father figure standing in for the one who is absent. And there are still many of us who need this example of a man who loves past hurt, and accepts with faith the miraculous. We are given no story of Joseph’s struggle to believe; an angel appears to him in a dream, and he obeys the angel. May we believe like Joseph, but even more, may we love like Joseph, showing kindness in the worst of situations.

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And here is your egg nog for today. It’s not about Christmas, but it is about fathers.

My three-year-old daughter is fascinated with the nativity story, and especially with Mary. One of her frequent games is to put a towel or a blanket on her head, imitating Mary’s veil, and, with folded hands, look beatifically peaceful at whatever stuffed animal she has wrapped up to be baby Jesus.

My daughter knows what Mary looks like. At least, she thinks she does. Most nativity scenes portray her the same way: veiled, kneeling, looking peaceful and reposed. She is young, serene and unthreatening. Most preachers will portray her in a similar manner. I cannot count the number of sermons I have heard where Mary is described as “a young teenage girl” somewhere beteen 13 and 17.

When I look into the Bible to see what picture is drawn of Mary, I find something different. Nowhere is her age given. Her personality is presented in a few short speeches which do not suggest someone passive, non-threatening and demure. The longest speech given to Mary in the gospels is the Magnificat, the Song of Mary written in Luke’s Gospel 2:46-55, a poem celebrating the overthrow of the powerful and the exaltation of the downtrodden.

Many biblical scholars have pointed out that the narrative presented by Luke mimics the narratives of the Old Testament about women who conceived after long periods of barrenness. Mary’s song itself follows the style of the song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2. If we allow Luke to paint a picture of Mary’s age, his allusions to the barren matriarchs suggest that Mary was a woman who conceived after a long period of childlessness.

In Luke 2:48 Mary rejoices over the pending birth saying God “has been mindful of the humble state of his servant.” Her humbleness, her humiliation, has been reversed by God’s gift of this child. Even in societies like Mary’s where women were profoundly pressured to have children, it was not shameful for a teenage virgin to be childless. If Mary has a humiliation that can be taken away by having a child, that strongly suggests that she was not a young girl at all, but, like Hannah, someone old enough to feel the sting of seeing her peers have many children while she had none.

How does it change your image of Christmas if Mary was not a naive teenage girl full of dreams about the future, but a virgin in her thirties or forties, knowing the disappointments of life? What does that teach us about her hope and joy and faith in God?

I think it makes it immeasurably richer. The choice of Mary as Jesus’ mother was not only a gift to the world, but a gift to one woman. The advent of the long-awaited Messiah was also the birth of one mother’s long-awaited son. The fulfillment of hope to a disappointed and pain-filled world was also the fulfillment of hope to a disappointed and humiliated woman.

God’s love for the world is mirrored in his love for the individual. God acted to save the world; he also acted to heal a childless woman’s heart. On this first day of Christmas, may we know and believe that God’s love is both universal and personal, reaching as high as heaven, but reaching also to the innermost secret of the ordinary heart.

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And since I can’t offer you a cup of egg nog, refresh yourself with this:

JellyBean (at age 2) and Sweetpea (at 11 months). When Mama inconveniently failed to leave out laundry or dish towels for JellyBean to use to “be Mary,” she improvised by taking off her shirt to wrap around her dolly (playing the part of the swaddled baby Jesus) and popped an empty drawer from her toy chest on her head to be her veil. Then she and her sister celebrated her performance by knocking back a few cold ones.

On the Christian liturgical calendar, there are twelve days of Christmas. December 25th is the first day of Christmas, and the Christmas season continues until January 6th, Epiphany, the day in which we remember the wise men who brought gifts to baby Jesus.

Az and I have made some attempts to recognize all Twelve Days in the past, with only mixed success. Our most successful family tradition has been to host a Twelfth Night party each year (though I think we skipped the Twelfth Night that JellyBean was two-months-old). The point of a liturgical calendar is to recognize the sacredness of time apart from our own busy-ness and priorities, to recognize that God made and sustains time, not our bosses or our schools or the television season. To honor this, I have our party on the actual Twelfth Night (January 5th) every year, even if it falls on a weekday. Some years the party is only a handful of folks over for an hour or two at dinner; other years it is a big, joyful chaos, flowing with wine and laughing, running children.

We are planning a party again this year, though I expect it will be fairly small, due to the transitions going on in our lives and the lives of so many of our friends. I wish you could all join us. What better place to meet and welcome my new friends?

This is the first year I have been a blogger at Christmas, and I thought I would try to honor the season by writing a special post for each of the Twelve Days of Christmas. I am not sure I can actually manage to post once a day for twelve days, but I will give it a shot, so if you’d like a little holiday refreshment between December 25th and January 5th, stop by here, and I will try to provide.

The children are taking a nap because Mommy is tired. We all caught the Martian Death Cold last weekend, and I spent Sunday in bed asleep till 4 pm. Az kindly took over the childcare. The girls are now almost completely healthy, and have that manic energy that always follows a bout of sickness. I am at the end of my rope, so I put them to bed.

I have reached that familiar stage of pregnancy where I do not want any children, including the ones I already have. I want to clean my horrifying house in peace and know that it will stay clean for a day or two. I want to go for a long walk without worrying about when I come home. I want to sit and drink hot tea, kept dangerously on a coffee table, and read a long, intricate book that requires more than two minutes of concentration. I want to sit in my living room without listening for unexplained thumps, cries or running water. I want to walk by the bathroom without finding my 18-month-old dipping something new in the toilet.

In short, I want my old life back.

Except I don’t really. I know that in a few hours they will do something that charms my socks off. In a few days I will feel in better spirits, and they will feel less caged, and we will have a smoother day. In a few years I will long for the time when they were little and needed me this much. I know that a day or two without them would be respite, but a lifetime without them would be tragedy. The bad days are temporary. Age has not exactly brought me patience, but it has brought me steadfastness and hope. I know it gets better, because I’ve been here before.

But then, I don’t need to explain these things to you. You’ve been here before, too.

(My OS is too outdated to allow me to post YouTube videos on the blog, but if you would like to see my feelings today summed up visually, search YouTube for the word “penguin” and watch the first resulting video).

Bub and Pie recently posted on the little indulgences that get you through the day. Her list is a good one, and worth checking out.

When I was single and struggled with occasional bouts of depression (I still do), my father would remind me to always give myself something to look forward to. Each week I would pick something pleasant to anticipate and give me hopeful comfort. My first year of my doctoral program, I waited for Friday afternoon when the local public radio station played old sci-fi radio programs from the fifties. The creativity of the programs tickled me, and the antiquated notions about sex, race and the speed of scientific achievement added an anthropological interest.

The danger of pinning my emotional health on something to look forward to, of course, is that when something disrupted my plans and I missed the awaited pleasure, the disappointment was crushing. One of the reasons that I decided to marry was the observation that single folks tend to pin so much on the structure they establish for their emotional health that many of them begin to hate - real, deep-down hate - the people and things that disrupt that structure. I noticed that happening in myself, and I hated that character flaw. I needed the daily rasp and rub of a loving, disruptive person to add texture to my life.

But now that we have children, those rubs and rasps can get a little too frequent, and I end up raw and in need of healing. I get a few precious hours away from the children each week, but a little more is necessary to care for them and enjoy them at the same time.

Nothing makes you appreciate a shower like having a baby. When the baby is tiny and wants to be with you all the time, waking you at random hours, bathing becomes a rare luxury. When every rare moment without the child becomes a choice between activity and sleep, most of us choose sleep. Most weeks I only get to shower once or twice, and when I am pregnant and my sense of smell is about three times as sensitive, that takes a crushing toll on my self-esteem.

But as showers become more infrequent, they become more luxurious. I am not a fussy gal; left to myself, I don’t bother much with creams and cosmetics and assorted vanity goops. A couple of times a year when the sun is a little harsh on my wrinkles, I will try anti-aging products, and abandon them as quickly when they give me acne - not quite the anti-aging effect I was looking for. But since having babies, a bath or shower has become a spa experience.

When JellyBean was a few weeks old and an extremely demanding nursling, my in-laws visited, and, with three adults to amuse her imperial majesty, I decided I would like to take a bath. I intended a real bath, a refuge from responsibilities, where I would not concern myself with what anybody else wanted. I asked everyone if they needed to use the bathroom and, when they declined, made sure I would not be in their way if I locked the door and took a bath.

Then I filled our roomy cast-iron tub with hot, bubbly water. I poured myself a cool glass of riesling. I found my favorite herbal soap, and some face cream. I got out a favorite novel and a tray that stretched across the tub to hold my book. I think I even lit a candle. And I soaked and drank and read and lathered and unwound for an hour.

When I finally got out, my mom-in-law said, in that tone of voice only possible for mothers-in-law, “That was a long bath.” My husband said, “I was afraid you’d fallen asleep.” I smiled seraphically and said, “No. I just took a bath.” They have never commented again. Now the family knows when I say a bath, I mean a bath.

Showers are just as nice. I have long, thick curly hair which is very beautiful if I can wash it every day, but is frizzy and extremely ordinary when I can’t (I am getting it cut today for this very reason). A shower is thirty-minutes long, rinsing and gently getting out knots, conditioning and rubbing in brown sugar to get build-up off the roots, and rinsing again. The water soothes and rinses away my tension and bad temper.

Once out of the shower, I put gel in my hair to keep down the frizz, and then the children cluster around me, wanting to play with mama’s hair. Sweetpea sits in my lap and holds handfuls of curls, rarely pulling, and pronounces, “Mommy’s haa-ew! Haa-ew!” JellyBean stands next to my chair, stroking my hair, saying, “Mommy’s hair is pretty. Mommy has curly hair.” One shower and I become a celebrity.

A private respite AND adoration. What could be better?