Looking for Christmas: A Search for the Joy and Hope of the Nativity

Novelist VanLiere (The Day of Ezekiel’s Hope) delivers an earnest ode to a holiday that, she argues, has been sanitized in contemporary culture by picture-perfect celebrations and secular customs. Unpacking elements of the Christmas story, she highlights how Mary “provided a loving home for God’s only Son” at the risk of being shunned for getting pregnant out of wedlock and how steadfast Joseph was chosen to be Jesus’s adoptive father despite being a “nobody by the world’s standards.” Other chapters discuss Jesus’s birth in a manger after Joseph and Mary were denied a room in the local inn—humble origins, she argues, that foreshadowed Christ’s dedication to the disadvantaged. Throughout, the author uses the Christmas story to highlight how Jesus welcomes the “brokenhearted and downtrodden”—a reassuring point that she hammers home a bit clumsily (on the lack of space in the Bethlehem inn: “There was no room for the King of kings to lay His head, but he always makes room for you.... The doors of Bethlehem were closed to him but He has flung open wide the doors of heaven to us”). Though this treads familiar ground, it will uplift Christians looking to rediscover the season’s joys. (Sept.)