It’s a story almost as old as our culture.  A story so filled with hope, with love, with joy that we set a whole season aside for the telling of it.  A story so central to our understanding of ourselves that we seek it out again and again.

It’s a Christian story, but it speaks powerfully beyond the walls of any church.

It’s the story of the birth of a baby. 

It is, in the deepest possible way, the story of every baby. 

The Bible gives us everything we need for the telling.  Language.  Characters.  Conflict.  Resolution.

“And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.”

We know it well.

I grew up in a traditional Christian church and spent more than a quarter of a century as a clergy wife.  The rhythms of the Nativity story are as familiar to me as the beating of my own heart. 

So . . . why tell it new?

The answer is simple.  When we know a story too well, we flow with it, but we don’t hear. 

An example?  In my first college Shakespeare class, we were required to memorize and recite a passage from each play we studied, an assignment I enjoyed. 

When I studied Shakespeare again in graduate school, I discovered that each time I came upon one of those memorized passages I might as well have stepped onto a sliding board.  The instant I read the opening words, I slipped out the other side without knowing where I had been.  It took supreme effort to return to the top and move through the passage again with thought and care.  It took even more effort to feel the impact of what I was reading.

So that is why, loving the Nativity story, I return to it, find new words for it, a new way of holding it up to view.  Its very familiarity allows the lightest touch to bring it to life.  I return to it, also, because it carries a message that is large and wide, much larger and much wider than its place at the heart of one religious tradition.

That story, so fundamental to my heritage, tells of the birth of the Child, but it also celebrates the sanctity of every child.  Incarnation lies at the core of Christianity. Not in my mind as a one-time event but as an every-time one.  “God in us” a Quaker would say.

And such a profound truth deserves to be—even needs to be—told fresh to be truly heard.

Thus my newest picture book, The Animals Speak:  A Christmas Eve Legend, illustrated by Brittany Baugus, published by Beaming Books.

The Animals Speak retells the story of the Christ Child’s birth and accompanies the telling with a legend that grew up long ago surrounding that birth.  That on midnight on that first Christmas Eve the animals found speech.  And that on every Christmas Eve since, they wake at midnight to speak again. 

My telling is a spare and simple one, the story merely touched on, laid open rather than repeated.

“Long and long the story has been told . . .

“Long and long the story . . .”

“Long and long . . .”

Readers/listeners are invited to complete the telling in their hearts.

All are invited into hope, love, joy.

And here is a video of a reading of The Animals Speak: