Christmas is a Work of Art
That line was from the News From Lake Wobegone on A Prairie Home Companion on December 9. Garrison, as usual, says a whole lot in a few words. Like all great works of art, he said, it is born out of pain and fear and adversity.

Christmas is a work of art. It's a time of great gentleness and generosity and kindness and good manners and an attempt to make other people happy. And like other works of art it comes out of grief and suffering. Great art is not created by happy contented people. Why would they bother?
--Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion

He talked then about the elegance of his childhood Christmases created by women who had come out of the depression and other such adversity. It was, he implied a bright and shining moment in which that adversity and difficulty could be pushed away, if only for a night and day.

Yes, Christmas is a great work of art, from its very beginning, in the midst of darkness and adversity in the occupied Roman territory. It was a work of art that a young woman and her older husband to be, far from home in an ancestral city, would have to place their new child in a manger. It was a work of art with shepherds and angels and light and hope given to a world waiting without knowing it was happening.

It was - and remains - a work of art- the Art of God and God's grace. All else is but a copy.