In life-long church attendance and in decades of parenting, my husband and I have attended too many Christmas programs to count.  Those of my youth were, without exception, all traditional nativity plays with the coat hanger winged angels, bath-robed shepherds, and an embarrassed Joseph having to be paired with a cute Mary holding the plastic baby doll.  Even so, somehow those stories as told by children, affected people with the simple message of the Savior King born in a stable.

Our children participated in nativities as well as some contemporary plays featuring the true meaning of the holiday, usually with storylines including the fight against materialism at Christmas.  This year we witnessed the funniest and most compelling two-part Christmas program I’ve ever seen.

Through a special invitation of a friend, we attended the program at the Caldwell Correctional Center where the inmates performed “Baby Jesus on Lockdown” and then a traditional nativity play.  During the first part, I truly laughed out loud at the funny lines in a hilarious story of a church’s live nativity gone wrong, resulting in the arrest of the cast.  (Examples: an unruly mule with a fake camel hump wreaks havoc and the cemetery catches fire.)  I sat amazed at how well those actors played their parts.

During the nativity part of the program, I looked around the room and wondered how each man ended up in prison, where his life got off track with the law.  One fellow looked and acted for all the world like actor Will Smith, another reminded me of Johnny Dep.  One man could have been a double for Gene Hackman. In another life, born under different circumstances, influenced by different people, how many of them could have had radically different stories?

Yet, despite their circumstances, void the comforts of family and friends in a holiday setting, those men could perhaps know more than the rest of us the truest sense of Christmas, why Jesus came.  Without all the frills of holiday presents, food, and decorations, the Good News is all that remains, and for many of those inmates, that appeared to be enough.  A jail is a true Christmas place, full of people Jesus came to set free; those men embracing the gospel were actually freer in their incarceration than some people I know living outside those walls.

I discovered the same real Christmas at Brenner Children’s Hospital in Winston-Salem four years ago when our family spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day out in the pediatric intensive care lobby area where, to hold my extended family together, I served my ham and rolls, and other foods we typically enjoy during the holidays.  We camped out there and waited our turn to go in to see our number three grandson who had pulled a crock pot of scalding cider over his precious little head and front of his body.

In the lightning strike second of time when our evening went from calm to chaos, any demand that Christmas be a certain way evaporated.  Walking the hallways of that hospital, I saw dozens of kids and their loved ones spending Christmas in our shared captivity.  Their families, just like ours, were there simply trying to survive their children’s awful injuries and illnesses.

For hurting, grieving folks like us, Christmas celebrations in the Hallmark sense seemed a mockery of our pain; no magic moments occurred where everything worked out perfectly while snows fell in the background.  I found something far greater though, the sense of the presence of Emmanuel, God with us, in that painful place.

Christmas Day can be a letdown for people putting all their hope in the ephemeral spirit of the holiday without any substance.  Jesus came for the broken-hearted, maybe hearts broken by the disappointment of a Christmas gone wrong with family troubles.  One way or the other, I think we are all candidates for the grace brought into this world by the Savior sent to bear the brokenness of the human condition, the antidote for sin.

Isaiah 61:1 reads: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, Because the Lord has anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound . . .”  That is the essence of a truly Merry Christmas.