There's a fire in the fireplace, and the children are snuggled around you, and it's time to read a story. The story is asked to you that question. What do you truly love?
What truly matters to you? And the stories over and over again kind of reorientate us towards the true north of what our lives really ought to be about. Welcome to Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller "The 5 Love Languages" . A literary feast is straight ahead as we welcome professor and author Dr. Tim Larson. He has some great Christmas stories that have stood the test of time from authors through the ages.
From Chesterton to Dickens, Lucy Maud Montgomery to Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, George MacDonald, and don't forget O. Henry. You're going to hear about some classic Christmas stories today on Building Relationships. And if you go to the website buildingrelationships.us, you'll see the new book 12 Classic Christmas Stories compiled by our guests.
Just go to buildingrelationships.us. Gary, there's something about hearing a story read to you that is so invigorating, I think. Did you experience that as a child?
I did, Chris. Yeah, my mom, mostly my mom. My dad once in a while would read, but my mom was the main one who read us stories on a regular basis. And of course at Christmas time, yeah, we heard a lot of the Christmas stories as a child because I had no idea of the history of all those stories and the people who wrote those stories.
You know, mom just read them to us. But I'm excited about our program today, and I think anyone during this Christmas season will find this discussion helpful and the book that we're talking about very helpful. Well, and this might be, you know, just a couple of weeks here before Christmas, a good time to just kind of slow down as you listen to the program, just slow down and listen to our guest as he talks about these stories. Dr. Timothy Larson is McManus Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of History at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. He is also an honorary fellow at Edinburgh University and has been a visiting fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge University and All Souls College at Oxford. He is the author of nine books, including George MacDonald and the Age of Miracles, and he's edited a dozen volumes, including the Oxford Handbook of Christmas. Our featured resource today is 12 classic Christmas stories, a feast of Yuletide tales.
You can find out more at buildingrelationships.us. Well, Dr. Larson, welcome to Building Relationships. So glad to be here, Dr. Chapman. Before we look at these stories, which I'm excited about, tell us a little bit about yourself, your path to being a professor of both history and Christian thought. Yes, my father joined the Air Force when he was 17 years old. He fought in the Korean War and he loved military history. I grew up with military history all the time.
We would reenact the Civil War. And that is just like a dream childhood with horses and cannons and swords. I say I'm a historian because I love the smell of gunpowder. So when I got to go to college, first generation, I studied history and I just carried on the path. And I'm glad to be a historian and I'm glad to study the church, which my father taught me to love as well. Well, that's exciting. Now, I'm not going to discuss which side of the Civil War you were on.
OK, I live in the South. You know, we look back on our history and realize there's a whole lot of stuff that went on, you know, and it's going on today. But we're not going to talk about that today. OK, we're going to talk about Christmas. So Chris asked me if I remember hearing stories as a child and the answer to that same question.
You were just talking about that, actually. You were read to as a child. Did they read stories other than military stories?
Yes, and it was the whole family. My father would gather us as a family and read aloud to us. And it was exciting. I remember as a child really wanting to know what happened next, you know, and it was like the end of the chapter. And that was all we're doing now. And I was waiting for that to happen again.
Jean Stratton Porter, an Indiana novelist, I remember vividly him reading aloud some of her novels. And it was a special time, for sure. Yeah. You know, I think it's good to focus on children and reading stories to children. But as adults, we can also benefit from Christmas stories and other stories, right?
Yes, absolutely. My wife, Jane, and I are now empty nesters, and she wonderfully reads aloud to me. In fact, almost all the stories in this collection, she read aloud to me. We do that regularly, and it's a wonderful practice. It's a way that we can draw closer to each other. The great thing about reading a story aloud is you can stop at any time and make comments. If you're watching a movie, that's harder to do. But we read a lot of mysteries, and we'll kind of, like, guess with each other.
Like, don't forget about that clue. I wonder what that means, how that ties into what's happening now. And it's a beautiful way to draw close to somebody. You know, I'm guessing that a lot of our listeners, if not the majority, really are not experiencing that in their marriage.
Husband and wife reading back and forth to each other. I'm just guessing. I don't know what your experience has been outside your own experience. But I understand what you're saying. It can be a very uniting thing because you're focusing on whatever the topic is, and you're asking questions along the way if you wish. So, yeah, I think I get what you're saying. Everything in life that has rewards takes a bit of attentionality and effort, you know? And so it's the kind of thing that it's worth it, but it does take a bit of a commitment to say, let's try this out and see how it goes.
Yeah. Well, I hope our listeners out there, somebody will say, hey, we can do that. Why don't we try that? And I think that whole thing of participating in the story, Dr. Larson, is a lost art as well. Because in this age of, you know, quick reads and screens and all of that, it's almost like we become passive observers. But when you hear a story read to you and you're talking about it, you're thinking about that next thing that's going to happen. Or you can ask your children or your spouse, what do you think is going to happen when we turn the page here? That takes you to a different level, doesn't it? It's much more interactive.
It's an exciting way to build a relationship. Stories are powerful and transformative. There is an account of somebody who heard read aloud Dickens' A Christmas Carol when it was first published.
He was a major factory owner in Massachusetts. And he says to his wife afterwards, next year, I'm going to have my workers get the day off for Christmas. He's feeling the story and it's changing him.
And that can happen to all of us. Yeah, that's great. Well, Chris, I'm sitting here thinking, well, just read us a story, Tim. Yes, exactly.
That's what I want to do. Well, you know, now all of these Christmas stories, I mean, all of these stories that you have in the book are Christmas stories. But there is a lot of variety in this collection, including even ghost stories and romantic comedies. And why did you include so many different kinds of stories in this book?
Yes, thank you for asking that. One of the things that I've done in the collection is each story has an introductory paragraph by me, which helps you understand what kind of story it is so you can choose the one that feels best for the moment that you're in. And I think almost all of us know if you're doing something with the family, that you have one member of the family who definitely doesn't like something or is really keen on something else. So I wanted you to be able to read the introductions and say, what would best fit our family or whoever this group of people is that is together now? So maybe we've got somebody who doesn't like a sad story and really wants a happy story or somebody who wants more adventure and doesn't want romance, wants something kind of more thrilling and exciting and kind of chasing around.
So I wanted to be able to have something there for everybody. Yeah. Well, given that there's all this variety in the stories, is there a theme that is common throughout the stories?
There is. And I read just heaps and heaps of Christmas stories in order to select the 12 for this book. So I've really got to know the genre. And what I discovered reading them, so many of them, was that reconciliation in relationships is really the kind of heart of a Christmas story. Well, here's the beginning of one of the stories in 12 classic Christmas stories.
See if you recognize it. One dollar and eighty seven cents. That was all. And 60 cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it.
One dollar and eighty seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas. Well, Dr. Larson, how would you define the true spirit of a Christmas story? A Christmas story is really about seeing the other people that are around us, seeing them with eyes of love, with understanding. And that brings about often forgiveness, reconciliation, a change of our behavior.
It's both about people who are just in need or suffering. Many stories are about just seeing the people around us who are in greater need than our family is and we are. But it's also the people inside our family. Maybe we've been taking them for granted. Maybe we've let little things annoy us. Maybe some real conflict has gotten out of control and there needs to be a way of getting it behind us and getting our relationship back together. Underneath it all, we love them.
But yet somehow we've let that love get suppressed by our sense of how unfair it was that they did this thing or how hurt we are. And the story is telling us, like, this is the moment to kind of think about how you value this relationship, how you can get it stronger, how you can get it back on track again. Yeah, I can see if a whole family, maybe even extended family, is reading one of these Christmas stories that some of the thoughts and feelings of the relationships will be bubbling up while they're hearing this.
And after the reading of it, there might be even a different atmosphere in the room. So let's talk about some specific stories. Many readers will know a Charles Dickens novel, A Christmas Carol, but probably not the short story by Dickens that you have included in this book, The Goblin Who Stole a Sexton.
Tell us about this story. It's a goblin story. Who would not want to read a story about goblins? So that is part of the Christmas tradition. We'll have scary ghost stories and the tales of the glories of Christmases long long ago. So these kind of fantastical ghost stories are part of the tradition. Of course, A Christmas Carol is itself a ghost story. It's the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. And so here we have a goblin story, and that's great fun. A sexton in this context, what it's emphasizing is that person is a gravedigger.
They're the one who buries people. And it's a very fun story about a very grumpy man who is not at all in the spirit of Christmas. And he starts to encounter goblins who make him think about his life and the way he's been living. Hmm. And you're saying that there is that theme, a similar theme in that in the original The Christmas Carol.
There is. And this is so interesting and exciting. I did not know this until I did this book.
And I imagine most people don't know it. This was actually his Charles Dickens original attempt to use this plot. The story that we have, A Christmas Carol, is really his taking and working into a full length novel. This idea he had for a plot in the goblins who stole a sexton.
And so you get to see his mind working and you see a different version of a story that we all love. Maybe the story that is most told at Christmas time is A Christmas Carol. And if you know that story really well and you're familiar with it and you want to kind of like just play with it a bit, you can do it as a goblin story from Dickens himself. That's very exciting. You know, readers might also be surprised that you included a Sherlock Holmes detective story.
The adventure of the blue carbuncle. What makes it a Christmas story? You might not think of a Sherlock Holmes mystery as a Christmas story, but this is a true Christmas story.
And for two reasons. The first reason is that it's set at Christmas time. But of course, we have a lot of cultural kind of debate about whether that's enough to call something a Christmas story.
A lot of films get debated on whether or not they're a true Christmas film just because they're set at Christmas time. So we go one level farther with this Sherlock Holmes story. It ends with the true spirit of Christmas. It's quite an extraordinary ending. I'm being very careful in the introductions in my book and in this conversation not to give away any spoilers.
But this is not a plot spoiler. It's just a kind of reflection at the end where Sherlock Holmes himself says about the criminal who's been captured that he hopes that his soul will be saved. And that we think about this at Christmas time, that Christmas is a time of forgiveness. And what would it mean for this man to be restored, for his life to be turned around, away from a life of crime to a life that would be a worthy life?
And Christmas might be the moment when this could happen for him. I'm sure that a lot of our readers who are really into Sherlock Holmes are going to want to read this particular story as well. Of the 12 stories in your collection, which do you consider to be the most famous and why do you think it's so popular?
I think unquestionably it's O. Henry's story, The Gift of the Magi. Its fame is very demonstrable because so many film versions of it have been made. And not only has it been made into a movie over and over again, but many other films and innumerable TV show episodes have stolen its plot.
And so even though it's not an actual remake, it is the plot itself taken from O. Henry. The plot is very clever. It has an extremely satisfying plot twist to it that makes the story haunting and delightful. And people think about it over and over again. But it also has a great heart to it. So once you know the plot twist, you still come back to the story because of the emotion and the power of the emotion in the love and relationship that is there between a husband and wife.
That's what I experienced as a kid, because I had uncles, we'd go down to my grandmother's house and the uncles would be there and I would ask them every time, tell the story about when you went hunting and you went, you know, possum hunting and you caught the mink and that kind of thing. It was like the same story. I wanted to hear it again and again. And this O. Henry story is the same way, isn't it? There are nuances to the suffering that you mentioned a little and the want and the need, you know, of both the husband and wife and the desire to show love to the other. And then what happens at the end?
We won't give it away if you haven't read it. But there is this thing about hearing the same story again and again that really hits the nerve, right? Because we're different every time we come to the story.
And so it's a kind of fixed point that helps us kind of reflect on where we're at now in our relationships and the things that we're thinking through. So there is something wonderful about that returning of a plot into our lives over and over again. And this O. Henry story, The Gift of the Magi is just so perfect for doing that.
I joke that you can think of it as a romantic story if you're broad minded enough to imagine a romance being a story about a husband and wife. You know, Chris, I'm sitting here thinking that a lot of folks who are listening today to this program, if they get this book and they read some of these stories this Christmas, it will become an annual affair. They'll be pulling this book out every Christmas. As you said, the repetition of these stories as children are growing up can be powerful as well, of course, for adults. The other thing is that kids will capture this as well, because as I mentioned, we don't want to throw the internet away or screens away.
I think we have really harsh words sometimes for what's going on in the culture. But the problem with kids and screens, Tim, is that that's all they know. And if they are given something else, if they are given this thing, you know, sitting down and reading this story and they capture that, then that's something that they're going to want for themselves. And then later on, they do the same thing for their kids, right?
Absolutely. Partly what makes Christmas magical is that we do things that we don't do the rest of the year or we don't do very often. We eat foods that are different from the foods that we have other times in the year, and it gives it this celebratory, heightened connection.
And so, yes, maybe we're not reading aloud very much in our regular lives anymore. But if you do it at Christmas time, you've created this magical memory of something different that we do and something that takes a little more work, a little more effort, precisely does that effectively. Our family goes out and cuts down a Christmas tree every year for our Christmas tree.
It would be easy just to either have an artificial one or to buy one already cut down in a lot nearby. But that process of going out and who gets to saw and carrying it with each other makes memories for us that we love. And so putting a bit of effort in to make this a heightened different time is exactly what we do at Christmas. You're bringing back memories, Tim, in my own life, because we used to do that when I was a kid. I remember going across the railroad tracks into this field and all these trees and cutting down trees. It wasn't our land. I've often looked back and wondered, did Dad get permission to do that?
But we never heard anyone complaining about it. We had the same thing. I still have the picture of me as this little cherubic little kid with the toboggan on with the hat on and the gloves and everything smiling at this little Charlie Brown tree that we went out and got and dragged back into the house. And those are some of the warmest memories that I have of my childhood, doing that together. And that's what these stories will heighten in you. If you go to buildingrelationships.us, you'll see 12 classic Christmas stories, a feast of Yuletide tales.
Go to buildingrelationships.us. I have to ask you here, Tim, do you have a favorite Christmas film? I know that this is a book. These are stories. But is there a film that you feel does the same thing that these stories do? Yes, I do watch the same films over and over every year as well.
I always try to find new ones also, but I have my go to list. And not surprisingly, It's a Wonderful Life is the one that is the highest in my canon of Christmas films, but one that people might not have heard of is called The Bishop's Wife. And they both are very similar films in that they cause you to reflect on the fact that your life that you're living now, though it has its hassles and its weariness and its challenges, is actually a life that has deep meaning and dignity. The relationships that you're in right now with your family are the most important thing that you have in your relational world.
And you need to kind of come back to that and not let some vacuous notion of striving for success, impressing the wrong people, something you've got in your head that you have to do to prove yourself, destroy all the good things that you have in your life that are right there in front of you if you can only see them. And isn't it interesting that It's a Wonderful Life was a short story before it became the camper film, right? Yes, absolutely. So many of the great films are actually based on literature. And of course, the most filmed of all is A Christmas Carol.
Yes. And my favorite Christmas Carol film other than Alistair Sim, the old Alistair Sim version is A Muppet Christmas Carol. I think the Muppets did one of the best things with the music and with the way that they framed that story that stayed faithful to what the spirit of Dickens and what he was trying to do. I just every time they say that's for kids. No, that was for my heart. Do you feel the same way?
I do. I love to watch endlessly new versions of that same plot. I like Scrooge with Bill Murray. So I can go all kinds of ways with that plot and enjoy them over and over again. In the book itself, Dickens has Scrooge go to church. And you see all the people streaming through the streets going to church for Christmas. And so there are moments that just are so touching when you hit that plot again. Isn't it interesting too that when you go back to these stories that are written, you know, years and years ago, decades or centuries ago, that they show the reality of what people thought about God in that culture. And it's different than what we experience today.
I am struck over and over again. I study the 19th century as a historian with how common family prayers were or how common daily scripture reading was, was how much it was assumed that you would go to church and attend. Even people who in novels or if you're reading historical records of real people who don't think of themselves as particularly spiritual, as a matter, of course, go to church and are participating in prayer times with their families, are reading scripture. Those are basic practices woven into life. This is the Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman podcast. Thanks for listening and for telling others about our conversations. When you go to FiveLoveLanguages.com, you can find more ways to strengthen your relationships. Just click the resources tab and you'll find the podcast there and today's featured resource.
Again, go to FiveLoveLanguages.com. Well, Dr. Larson, you included a story by George Macdonald, who had a great influence on C.S. Lewis and other writers. It's titled The Gifts of the Child Christ. Tell us about that story. You know, Dickens' A Christmas Carol is my favorite Christmas story of all, but George Macdonald's The Gifts of the Child Christ is my second favorite one. I just think it is such a powerful story. It is filled with faith.
I think it's almost too Christian for it to be widely known. People who pick Christmas stories often like to go more towards the cultural Christmas rather than really to the heart of faith. And so I think this story has not been anthologized the way it should be because of that. It also does have some sad elements. And so you have to be willing to be able to process some sadness to encounter a story like this. But it just gets me on a really deep level. It reminds us the most basic, powerful things about what we really care about in life, what we ought to care about.
If we have our head screwed on straight, if we're really thinking about life in a way that matters, that sees what is real and what is most important. This story will bring that home to you in a powerful way. Well, George Macdonald, of course, did a lot of good writing on various topics. And I actually haven't read this particular one, but I look forward to reading it.
Lucy Maud Montgomery is well known for her series about Anne of Green Gables. But what story of hers did you include in the book and why? The story is called Anne Cirilla's Christmas Basket. It's one of those stories.
I think I saw kind of versions of this in television plots a lot when I was growing up where you have a kind of cast of characters who all intersect their lives at Christmas and need to kind of think through something, learn a lesson, change the way they're behaving. And so it kind of brings out that sense of kind of the auditing of ourselves and our lives. What have I been? What kind of course have I been on? What trajectory have I been on?
And what needs a little adjustment here? Christmas is a time to just think about, am I living the way I want to live? Am I treating people the way I want to treat them?
Have I picked up some attitudes that I need to shed? It's a pretty light story. It's not a heavy story.
It has a lot of humor and fun in it. But it is a story that kind of haunts you and lets you go away and think about how am I living and how do I want to be living? What's the person I want to be? Christmas is a good time to be thinking about that theme, right? Because all of us at any juncture in life, there are things that we perhaps need to change.
You know, some things we might need to let go, other things we need to start. And Christmas, of course, when we're reflecting on the life of Christ and all that transpired at Christmas, you know, historically, it is a time for introspection and thinking about our lives. You know, there are a few authors in this collection, though people may not recognize their names, they might recognize the names of their most popular novels. Can you remind us of some of the beloved books that some of these authors also wrote? Yes, one of the authors that I included is Kate Douglas Wiggin, which is not a name that I think springs to anything to people's minds.
It certainly didn't for me. But she's one of those authors, like Louisa May Elcott, that I think we need to kind of discover again. They wrote at a time when they were writing in a way that was edifying, in a way that was suitable for families, but also had fun and wit and humor and just kind of mischievousness sometimes. So Kate Douglas Wiggin wrote Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and that was a classic of its day. Maybe you haven't heard that title, but it's one of those books to discover. It was so popular that it was turned into a film which Shirley Temple played the key character.
And so it has this kind of great cultural moment where everybody knew it, and it's there waiting for us to find it again. Is there another author that we may not know that you included in this book? An author that is known in kind of literary circles, if you're serious about literature, is Willa Cather. I think she's one of America's greatest novelists. She was a novelist of the West, especially families that were pioneering, that were struggling to carve out a farm in very hostile environment without any kind of infrastructure or stores or resources. How do you get through the winter?
How do you make this crop be viable for our living? It's a poignant story of America that she does over and over again. One of them is actually called O Pioneers.
My Antonio is another one. And I just find her writing just strikes me again and again with the dignity of ordinary people and their struggle to provide for their families. You know, as you share these things, I'm thinking that our listeners, along with me, might well be thinking, hmm, maybe I should take a history course in my local college and pick up on some of these things that I missed along the way. You know, there's so much in terms of history that I think we could learn from if we took time to reflect back upon what has happened in the past. Of course, you being a history professor, you probably would say amen to that, right?
Absolutely. And there's no pressure. You don't even have to take the tests. You can just do it as an audit and enjoy learning.
It's all there waiting for you. It's a great idea. Great idea. You know, my grandson was a business major at Wheaton College, just graduated a year or so ago. But I think he did take a history course or two. I remember he mentioned that. I don't know if he was in your class, but I do know that he took a history class.
I was glad to see that. Well, the oldest story in the book is by Washington Irving. It shows what Christmas was like 200 years ago. What did you find fascinating about that tale? It's really a very, very funny story. It's about a squire in England.
A squire is kind of an aristocrat with an old family on this kind of a state of land. And this squire is pretty fanatical about keeping up the old ways of Christmas. And he's kind of endearing, but he's made fun of a little bit as well. And that line, I think, is always there in all of our lives. Like, when is the person who's really into celebrating Christmas just like pushing it a little too hard and becoming a little eccentric or a little strange? You always know that one person who just over-decorates a little bit too much and you're like, OK, maybe we need to pull back a bit. But, yeah, it's kind of wonderful and it's kind of weird. And Washington Irving really captures that beautifully, that desire, that enthusiasm. Like, what would it mean to be all in with Christmas and do everything and all of the old traditions and all the old ways? And you have fun imagining that and thinking about yourself and where you are on that line of when is it too much and when is it actually a lot of fun? Well, you talk about a famous writer, Irving, if you mention him and I think of, unless I'm wrong, Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane, you know, those were some of the stories that he wrote, right?
Yeah. Washington Irving is interesting because his stories are almost more famous than he is now. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is another classic one. These are deep inside Americans' imagination.
We know these stories in film versions and people who've used the plot for other kinds of productions and we are familiar with them. But the name itself, Washington Irving, I think is less familiar than some of his plots are for us and some of his phrases as well. He made New York Gotham City. He talked about the almighty dollar. A lot of phrases that we all use come from Washington Irving.
He was America's first successful novelist. So he really captured people's minds in his time, but it's a long way back now to the 18th century and he's not as well known by name. Well, Dr. Larson, the idea of an old fashioned Christmas, which we talked about in our last segment a bit, it's an enchanting idea for many people today. So talk about how these stories can help in that quest to think and maybe perhaps relive some of the Christmases long ago.
I am a big believer in celebrating an old fashioned Christmas. People often say negative things about nostalgia. And there is a way in which nostalgia can be negative if what you mean by that is that you wish you were living in a different time, that you think those times are better and you wish you were there. And that is an ingratitude to the time that God has put you to live your life.
You return to God with gratitude and say, I'm living right now and I thank you for this life that you've given to me. But old fashioned Christmas is not necessarily about saying those times were better or I wish I was there. It's about connecting across time, about thinking about other people and what they've handed down to us and how our story continues on. Continuity across time is really important to us, I think, especially so if change feels like it's coming too fast in our lives. And I know that for me, it seems like my work has changed every single digital platform for everything that we do in the last six months or so. We're having to continually learn some new way to do very simple things. And with all that change, continuity is reassuring. There are things that are that endure. We do these things every year. They come around again.
We're excited about them. I did this when I was a child and now I'm doing the same thing with my child who's learning it and will pass it down to their child. And there's something delightful about that repetition annually, anticipating it, coming around again, passing it on to others. And so these stories help us remember people have been doing this for centuries upon centuries upon centuries. It's fun to read a story written in the 1830s and think, oh, they're also eating gingerbread cookies, just like we did last week. Or whatever it is that means a through line that we've been doing this and passing it down.
And that's delightful and reassuring. You know, many of these stories were written in the 19th century in what is sometimes called the Victorian age. So how did that period shape the ways that we still celebrate Christmas today? So much of what we think of as just traditional Christmas is actually Victorian Christmas or 19th century Christmas. Before the 19th century, Christmas was actually a minor holiday for lots of people. Lots of Christians didn't even celebrate Christmas. If they did, it was a very small affair.
It was definitely just one day. Victorians really made Christmas into this season that is the most wonderful time of the year. And so many things that we think of, it just always happens first in the 19th century or became popular in the 19th century. So Christmas trees really take off in the 19th century. Christmas cards are invented in the 19th century. This elusive figure called Santa Claus was not known about until the 19th century. So many carols that we think of as just traditional carols, like Silent Night would be perhaps my favorite Christmas carol.
It was written in the 19th century. And so we have all of these things coming down from that very special century to make just what we think of as, of course, this has to be a part of my Christmas celebration. Dr. Larson, you point out in the introduction of the book that a lot of Christmas stories include a death, often even the death of a child.
Why do you think that is? Yeah, it really struck me and surprised me when I started reading many, many Christmas stories all together over the course of a year that this would recur. It took me a long time to realize, well, of course, it's even there in the true Christmas story, the Nativity story, where we have Herod's slaughter of the innocents. This very, very tragic event that is there in our Nativity story.
And I started to wonder, why is this recurring? And what I came to realize, I think the primary thing is that the death allows you to really crystallize in your mind the people that you love and how it would be so retching if you lost them, if you were to have to grieve their loss. And so the death in the story lets you know it's not the end of the story with the people that are around you, they're still alive and part of your life. And you need to treasure them. You need to stop letting small things get in the way of the fullness of that relationship. You need to value them for the depth of your true love. And so the death in the story turns you to the people that are around you and you're like, I'm so glad that you're still here, that you haven't died, that you're a part of my life. How can I treat you in a way that actually accords with how I really feel about how important you are to me?
Yeah, I can see that. You know, I am working in the church, of course, a church, of course, so many, many deaths, and sometimes they happen at earlier ages, as you say here, a child, but it does remind us that we want to make the most of the relationships we have now. Well, as we come to the end of our time today, you know, at the end of your book, you include an essay titled, Is Christmas Unbiblical and Pagan? Why did you include that essay and what did you conclude? I'm so glad that Moody Press let me put that essay in the back of this book. I really wanted people to hear this. I actually wrote it for a Baptist church in Alabama that very kindly asked me to come and do a little conference on the history of Christmas for them. And this was the first talk that I gave, and people really needed to hear it. It really struck a chord.
And so I wanted to find a way to get this out to a wider audience, and I'm glad it's in this book. When I was doing the Oxford Handbook of Christmas, I studied Christmas intently for probably three or four years. I read all the great books about Christmas, all the great scholarship about Christmas. And I realized that this sense that some Christians have that maybe there's something pagan about Christmas or it's not quite biblical or not quite right is just wrong. It actually was started, part of it at least, by secular German nationalists who didn't want Christmas to be a Christian holiday.
They wanted it to be a German holiday. And so they created this idea that Christmas trees, for example, are really a pagan ancient symbol that's before Christianity. They just made that up. There's no evidence for that at all. It's not historically true. It was propaganda to try to turn the holiday in a different direction. And yet I know lots of Christians kind of feel a little bit of unease. They don't want to answer people when they raise these questions or they just not quite sure what the history is. It can all be rather murky.
So I want to just like face that squarely and just go through all of the issues one by one. Is there a problem that Christmas is connected to the winter solstice? All the kind of issues that people raise that made me kind of put some kind of fear or doubt in their mind and say, no, this is a thoroughly Christian holiday. Christmas is about celebrating God becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ. That's how the holiday was formed. That's what it's about. That's what it stands for. It's not unbiblical.
It's not pagan. Tim, one more question for you. What do we miss about Christmas that these stories enliven for us or help us find? I think that we're always wanting to turn our thoughts once again to the things that really matter to us. And the stories to me, that's the part I just keep coming back to.
The stories ask you that question. What do you truly love? What truly matters to you? Why have you been spending so much of your time and energy on something that even you know is not that important? It's just wrapped up in your vanity, something you want to prove to somebody or to yourself. And the things that matter most to you are getting somehow pushed into the background.
Somehow you're not actually prioritizing the things that you know if you think about it are the things that you value most, that you love most, that you are most proud of, that you most want people to remember you by. And the stories over and over again just kind of reorientate us towards the true north of what our lives really ought to be about. Well, Tim, this has been a delightful conversation, and I think the book will be even more delightful to our listeners. And I really encourage our listeners to get this book. You've got time now before Christmas actually gets here to be reading these to your family.
And if you're just single, reading them yourself, you know. So thanks again for being with us today, and may God continue to bless and guide you in all that you're doing. Thank you so much. As my father would always say, may this Christmas be your best Christmas ever.
Great. Dr. Tim Larson's been our guest. You can find our featured resource at buildingrelationships.us. It's 12 classic Christmas stories, a feast of yuletide tales. I know it will warm your heart.
Just go to buildingrelationships.us. And next week, another Christmas story that has been around since 1843. And don't say humbug. Take a deep dive into another Dickens tale in one week. Our thanks to our team behind the scenes, Steve Wick and Janice Bakking. Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in Chicago, in association with Moody Publishers, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.
