We all have our days of reckoning when it comes to Christmas. Remember that fateful moment when you came to the realization that Santa Claus was fabricated by parents (as a scapegoat for their gift-giving failures) and toy manufacturers (as a profit-making ploy)? This year I had a similarly painful epiphany, this one regarding what Linus says “Christmas is all about.”

I learned that there’s a very good chance that Jesus was not shut out of an inn by a hostile innkeeper and forced to give birth in some Godforsaken cave. (Another spurious artifact, the “stable” motif, long ago bought the farm, pun intended.) No, it’s most likely that the young parents, Mary and Joseph, were hosted by family back there in Bethlehem and delivered the Christ Child within the confines of their home, which might still have been a cave. Given that setting, they were likely assisted by family and/or a midwife, a far cry from the lonely birth witnessed only by animals.

The manger remains—it’s there in scripture. The Magi are still part of the picture, although they probably arrived on the scene closer to Jesus’s first birthday than on the night of His birth as depicted in the classic creche. So also those those scruffy n’er-do-well shepherds. (Note well: Pariahs (shepherds) and pagans (the Magi) were the first to know of the Incarnation, long before the religious elite or royal powers-that-be. That’s like God revealing himself to illegal immigrants and irreligious idolators before presidents and preachers. Think about it.)

All these minor details are just that and shouldn’t be allowed to distract us from the “the true meaning of Christmas.” This is not, contrary to what lame Hallmark Christmas movies tell us it is, a renewed romance with your old high school flame in your home town. It’s not spruces or snow or Santa, gifts or Grinches or gewgaws. No, it’s the ultimate drop-in, Immanuel, God with us. That part will not be shaken.

Merry Christmas.