The Real Story Of Christmas

As my daughters will tell you, I love complaining about how when I was a little kid we only had six television stations.  That made Christmas season really special even for us little Jewish children because that’s when they would broadcast cartoons at night!  Okay, so the ones about Frosty and Rudolph were pretty lame, but there were also the Grinch (Chuck Jones! Boris Karloff!) and, of course, Charlie Brown.

I loved Charlie Brown’s Christmas special…all the way up to the point where Linus starts getting all preachy about Jesus.  Then I would just tune out.  Why did they have to put that boring crap in the cartoon?  Even as a six-year old I thought it was so lame.

In high school I met all of the adult Linuses who couldn’t stop talking about Jesus and his miraculous birth, leading me to want to know the real story.  In rabbinical school I took several classes from the great New Testament scholar Michael Cook.  Here is what I learned….

http://youtu.be/oli0DTmPmGU