Quick inventory: the keyboard offers 🎅, 🤶 and 🧑🎄, three versions of Santa Claus. For the Christ Child, the count is zero. No manger, no ox and donkey side by side, no Magi. The guest of honour is missing from our holiday texts, and a truly Christian Christmas emoji has yet to be drawn.
Yet Christmas is first the birth of a poor child in Bethlehem, laid in a manger and announced to shepherds before anyone important heard about it. It is Midnight Mass with carols sung slightly off-key, the star on top of the tree, the school nativity play where the shepherds wear bathrobes and tea towels. Tradition says that Saint Francis of Assisi, at Greccio in 1223, had Christmas Mass celebrated beside a manger with a real ox and a real donkey: the living nativity scene was born that night.
So we are looking for a Nativity that fits in 18 pixels: a newborn in the straw, a guiding star, three figures loaded with gifts. Santa can keep his three emojis; we would simply like to make a little room in the stable.
Amen !by AI Generator
Amen !by AI Generator
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