You would never guess Mary was so very pregnant. The way she and Joseph stampede towards Bethlehem, Joseph running breakneck speed beside a donkey charging down a winding path. Like he was the breakaway ass at the Kentucky Derby for Donkeys.

At least that's what happens in my house. This race to Bethlehem takes place on a cloth countdown to Christmas calendar that seemed like such a good idea at the time. I assume it is designed for beatific children flanked by beaming parents to mark off the days of December with the holy family, inch by calm inch.

That's not what happens in my house. In my house we forget to move the travellers for days at a time. Then they have to take huge leaps forward after the huge fight to see who gets to move them this time. The chaos wrapped around the countdown calendar matches the general feeling of teetering on the edge of some kind of outer combustion or inner collapse that is the distinguishing mark of Christmas in our home.

The threat of chaos gets unpacked and set out on the coffee table around the same time as the plastic holly berries and the squat Santa of brilliant blues and blood reds that I bought at Winners. The one I love and everyone else hates.

Love and hate strung together like popcorn and cranberries. It is the undercurrent running beneath the shaky ground of overspending and exhaustion and the mountaintop of the occasional quiet and holy moment that is Christmas.

It's my thing, a woman thing-this ribbon of love and hate that I wrap around Christmas. It has to do with too much Martha in the kitchen and not enough Mary in the parlour, with having to figure out how to cook a turkey all the way through and the rumoured threat of deadly stuffing that can kill off your whole table. It has to do with too many outings and not enough innings.

I am a Christmas clergy widow, losing my husband to the demands of church life that pick up the pace in Advent until he charges pell-mell into Christmas like a brick wall and ends up exhausted, snoring and apologising on the family room coach on Boxing Day. It is a pageant rehearsal advent service choir recital hamper assembly senior-visiting ministerial potluck carol-singing special sermons special litanies and litanies of complaints special music and special visitors that need special meals extravaganza.

Followed by a 2:00am Christmas Eve briefing on what we got the kids for Christmas that year.

My husband tries to help-reminding me every year that no one expects miracles from me, the anti-Martha. But it takes a stronger woman than I to resist the siren calls of magazine covers with gingerbread high-rises and phyllo-wrapped pecan crusted wheels of brie rolled out of the kitchen by a woman whose shirt is buttoned up properly.

And into all this commotion, a Saviour is born. Amidst all this insecurity and overachieving, somewhere under all this crumpled wrapping paper and lost instructions and despite the 1000-piece Kathie Kiddie Kitchen, Emmanuel is with us. But so is the Sears Wish Book. And it seems to get so much more attention.

I have a friend who has built an entire theology around the love God has lavished upon us and the Sears Wish Book. That because He loved us so much that He sent His only begotten son, it simply makes sense for that Son's followers to purchase pages 57 up to and including page 63 in order to lavish a kind of love upon our children. Instead of justification by faith it is justification of something or other. If I need a boost before I go Christmas shopping, I give her a call and get her to explain it to me again. It helps.

In an attempt to move the attention away from what the children are getting to what they are giving, we do things like tearfully give away old used toys to make room for shiny new ones. And we save our coins, mostly the ones from the dryer and the couch, to buy a World Vision goat for poor people in some far off land. But in the moremoremore fever that spikes my children's temperatures till they are delirious with desire, all they manage to hear is that we are getting a goat. They whisper excitedly among themselves about our new goat until we explain again that the goat is not for us, it is for other people who may not be getting moonshoes for Christmas this year.

And somehow, miraculously, they eventually do get it, the giving part.

And maybe that is the miracle. That Christ is with us in the midst of a twenty-first century Canadian Christmas, despite everything we've done to Christmas, or everything we allow Christmas to do to us.

I used to think that if Jesus came back during his birthday blow-out that he would fashion a whip from all those discarded ribbons and crushed bows and kick us all out of his temple.

Now I am less certain. Maybe he would recognize our clumsy and extravagant gestures of Christmas celebration as the love for Him that they occasionally are, and stick them on his refrigerator door like a mother enchanted by a smudged drawing that makes little sense to anyone else.

There is something almost unbearably silly about how we celebrate Christmas-and something a little bit sacred too. And the fact that the sacred pops up so unexpectedly and catches you unaware when you're wearing some gold lamé sparkly thing that you normally wouldn't be caught dead in, glugging down egg nog from a reindeer cup, that makes it even more noticeable when it does appear.

That the holy really did enter into world history, my history, world mess, my mess, that moment and this moment. That all the other stuff: the oppressive countdown calendars, the dumb decorations, the events breeding more events, the singing Christmas trees, the gifts and the garbage are all props that come perilously close sometimes to stealing the show.

But they can't really.

They are all the things we do to ourselves and Christmas is about what He did for us. And at some moment, late on Christmas Eve as I arrange and rearrange the presents under the tree, making sure every pile is even, because even three year olds know when they are being ripped off, it happens. I stumble upon a holy moment of thinking about Jesus, and I pick it up, turn it over, and breathe it in with relief.