THERE was an unusual buzz of excitement in the little town of Greccio in Italy in the days before Christmas 1223.

Francesco – that odd young man who had given up his well-to-do life and wandered about dressed as a beggar and preaching the Christian message to anyone who would listen to him – was busy preparing a surprise.

All that anyone knew about it was that on Christmas Eve they were expected to go up the mountainside outside the town.

Knowing that whatever Francesco did would be unusual and unforgettable, they all turned out.

With flaming torches in their hands, they made their way through the woods up the hillside.

There they found Francesco – and the surprise he had prepared.

In a cave he had re-created the stable where Jesus was born.

There was the Christchild in the manger.

Also there were the ox and the ass. And there was Francesco – Francis of Assisi as we call him – ready to tell them the Christmas story all over again with a freshness and excitement they had never known before.

Francis of Assisi had made the first Christmas crib.

It’s easy to become jaded by the Christmas story. It’s easy to take Christmas carols and decorations for granted.

It’s easy to forget that there was an occasion when people saw a Christmas crib for the very first time.

And it’s easy to forget that more than a thousand years earlier than that, real people saw a real baby born in Bethlehem and began to realise that God was doing something new in our world.

The Christmas story is not jaded, though sometimes our response to it is.

The Christmas story tells how God took his place in our world and lived a human life, and went on to die a human death and rise again.

The Christmas story tells of God in the middle of things, in the heart of our lives. He’s not on the outside looking in. He’s not up there looking down. He’s not unaffected by our world and what goes on in it.

Our world has become God’s world. That’s the Christmas story.

Every Christmas, it should take us by surprise all over again.