Christmas delights the senses: for the eyes, colorful lights and imaginatively decorated houses, businesses and city streets; for the ears, traditional hymns and beloved carols, as well as popular holiday music for every taste, from Bing Crosby to Vince Guaraldi to Mariah Carey; for the taste buds, gingerbread, eggnog, hot buttered rum, ham and turkey, candied sweet potatoes – and for some, fruitcake.
Christmas smells? Freshly cut pine trees, warm cookies and hot chocolate, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. Maybe the cologne given to a hard-to-buy-for uncle.
Another version of Christmas smells would include the pungent odors of cows, donkeys or other barnyard animals that gave up their feeding trough for a newborn child. Or the smell of sheep clinging to the clothes of unwashed shepherds who came to see the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes.
The Magi, who could bring gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, followed a star – a phenomenon of the natural world that anyone could see, but led to a long journey with some difficulty locating the infant Jesus. In contrast, the lowly shepherds’ journey to Bethlehem – their journey to be with God – was short and uncomplicated, and perhaps not only in the geographical sense.
The shepherds were chosen to learn of Jesus’ Birth through supernatural means; the miracle is personally revealed to them by an angel. They decide to go to Bethlehem, and in the next line of Scripture, they are in the presence of the Holy Family. They were the first witnesses to the Incarnation, and they might also be called the first evangelists, because “they made known the message that had been told them about this child” and “all who heard it were amazed.” (Lk 2:17-18).
The Gospel doesn’t record the names of the shepherds or how many of them received the news of Christ’s Birth. They are not mentioned anywhere else in the New Testament. What Scripture does reveal is what they did after seeing the Christ Child: they returned to their flocks, to being shepherds. That meant returning to long days of isolation and harsh conditions, and being among the most marginalized members of their society.
In that regard, the anonymous shepherds can be compared to the most marginalized people today: those who depend on food assistance, who do the work that no one else wants to do, and who endure unpleasant and often challenging conditions, usually for low wages. The revelation to the shepherds of Jesus’ humble Birth is consistent with the Savior’s concern for the poor and the outcast in his public ministry, and also his warning to the self-righteous and greedy.
Another biblical figure with the smell of the sheep on him is the Old Testament prophet Amos. A sheep breeder, Amos rebukes sinners with complaints as relevant in contemporary America as they were in the ancient world:
Yes, I know how many are your crimes,
How grievous your sins:
Oppressing the just, accepting bribes,
turning away the needy at the gate. (Am 5:12)
In 1223, when Saint Francis of Assisi conceived the first living Nativity in Greccio, Italy, he wanted to tell the story of the Savior’s Birth in a way that was true to the shepherds’ experience and meaningful to the unfortunate of his own time.
Thomas of Celano, who wrote the first biography of Saint Francis, describes a nobleman being moved by the sight of Jesus lying in a manger and the saint rousing the child “as if from a deep sleep.”
Thomas says, “This vision was not unfitting, for the Child Jesus had been forgotten in the hearts of many.”
In describing the Greccio Nativity in his own book on the saint, “Francis of Assisi,” the scholar Arnaldo Fortini writes that Francis wanted the celebration of Christ’s Birth to be a celebration for everybody. “He wanted the poor and the hungry to sit at the tables of the rich, and oxen and asses, the humble beasts who had warmed the cold body of the baby Jesus with their breath, to be given more than the usual amount of grain and hay.”
Some would consider the saint’s vision softhearted, even sentimental, but it reflected both joy at the Savior’s humble Birth and concern for those whose lives ordinarily hold little joy.
Eight centuries later, that still seems like a good description of what Christmas should be. (And if you give your pets extra food on Christmas Day, Francis, the patron saint of animals, would approve.)
Carl Peters is former managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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