I have before me a six-year-old’s rendering of a giraffe. Its body has the shape of a large tennis ball, yellow with streaks of orange. Its neck reminds one of a long rigid cane cut from a Louisiana sugar field. A banana seems to serve for a tail, and four large green tree trunks for legs. It is all together delightful. Even more delightful was the way it was presented to me, with a smile and kindness. It was a wonderful piece of play and even more wonderful, that a bright-eyed child would, without vulgar display, freely present such a gift to her former principal. There was a tinge of grace in the play, the picture, and the presentation. Such graces shape the heart of a child. Such graces make for a hint of Christmas every day.
The dark sky had already paled a little in its frame of cherry-pink chintz. Eternity framed in domesticity. Never mind. One had to frame it in something, to see it at all. –Jan Struther, Three Stockings
Chintz is a shiny cotton fabric upon which is printed a floral pattern, a warm and suitable frame for an infinite sky. And it seems a good metaphor for Christmas, the infinite, ineffable God made flesh, a baby held by His mother. This reminds me of a rather striking concept, learned during my days as a theology student — obediential potency. In its broadest sense obediential potency means the openness of every creature to the Creator’s power to effect in it something beyond the powers of ordinary natural causes…