The True Meaning of Christmas, by Brad Miner

This is not a sermon such as Bishop Henry Brougham (David Niven) gives at the end of the film The Bishop’s Wife. And no angel has intervened to write this. Not as far as I know anyhow.

But this does come from watching Christmas movies, which, for a fortnight, television featured at Christmastime. Some were sweet and charming, and others were the more “serious” Biblical narratives that span the Greatest Story from the Incarnation to the Resurrection.

A few of those Biblical epics deal only tangentially with the beginning and end of the life of Christ on earth, focusing instead on stories derived from the persecution of the early Church – films in which St. Peter is a central character, although rarely the star: …