A Stable is the Perfect Place for Baby Jesus to be Born

This is a stable

Every Christmas we're inundated with comments from the pulpit, websites and blogs about how awful it was that Baby Jesus was "born in a smelly stable", "born among filth", "born in a filthy stable", "born in a really cold dank smelly stable". I just want to jump up and cry, "You've never even been in a barn, have you?"

It's evident that many of these priests and people never experienced the sweetness of a clean stable so how do they know what a barn is like? Several decades of my life were spent in barns—hunter and show barns, Thoroughbred racehorse barns, racetrack barns, sales barns, and Thoroughbred breeding and training farms.  

The Devil in Nativity Scenes

The Devil conversing with St Joseph
in lower right corner of this Nativity scene

Still complaining about the "executioner" figure in the Vatican's current Nativity? Here's a bit of perspective on that. 

Note that in the lower right hand corner of this ancient Eastern icon of the Nativity is the Devil seen conversing with St Joseph. ("Oh, horrors! What is HE doing there?!! It's positively pagan!)

Well, I'll tell you what he's doing there as well as in the Vatican's Nativity and it isn't pagan at all.

Paul Evdokimov enlightens us: "St Joseph is sitting to the side, deep in thought. The tempter stands beside him, in the garments of a shepherd saying: An old man like you cannot beget children or a virgin give birth any more than this staff can burst into flower. The Eastern liturgy tells us that a storm of contradictory thoughts rages in St Joseph's heart, and he was perplexed, but enlightened by the Holy Spirit, he sang Alleluia!"