Commentary: The day the angels sang the birth of a child

Christmas Eve. The children improvise costumes for a living nativity, as we read the Christmas story. Maren and Tommy are Mary and Joseph. Jimmy and Lily, with dish-towel shepherds’ headdresses, abide in the fields watching over their flock, played convincingly by Winnie the dog.

We begin with a reading from Isaiah, prophesying the Savior’s birth: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.”

Reading the words, I have to take care not to drift into singing them to their joyful setting in Handel’s “Messiah.”

Lily, examining the porcelain nativity figures on the piano, wonders: Who will be the angel?

Danielle, my wife, would be well cast in the part. But I answer that the story doesn’t mention angels at the stable.

I look at Maren, beautiful in a blue shawl, cradling her childhood baby doll, swaddled tight, and I think of Mary in the stable at Bethlehem. The story says nothing about angels in the stable. No Hollywood light and magic, no sweeping chords in the soundtrack accompaniment. Mary brought forth her firstborn son and laid him in a manger. And as far as the story tells, that was all the drama that happened in the stable.

It was almost a year since the angel had spoken to her, promising wonderful things. That’s how Mary remembered it — or thought she did — as the days and their daily troubles flowed past. Now a troop of peasants smelling of sheep were telling her a whole army of angels had sung to them in the fields, pointing their way to the child they now gazed upon with something indescribable in their eyes.

But the angels stayed in the fields, not the stable. It’s written that Mary pondered these things in her heart — but as far as we can tell she never heard the angels sing again.

I wonder if any of us hear them more than once. Whether, as time flows on, we all start to wonder: Were these things real? Do we really remember what we remember of the moments that struck us and changed us? Things once new start to seem old, and the marvelous, commonplace, as they take their places filed away among the accumulated memories.

But every so often, something scrapes the rust off the past, and we remember it as it really was. The angels really did sing.

THOMAS EASTMOND practices law in Irvine and lives in Newport Beach.