Christmas

On December 25 the Church keeps the Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord — Christmas, the birth of Jesus Christ at Bethlehem. The feast is the first of the three great Incarnation feasts: the birth at Bethlehem, the manifestation to the Magi at Epiphany, the baptism in the Jordan. December 25 was fixed as the date of Christmas in Rome by 336, and by the end of the 4th century it had spread throughout the Western Church. The Eastern Churches kept January 6 (Epiphany) as the combined feast of the Nativity and the Baptism until the same period, when December 25 was also adopted.

The Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, built by Constantine and dedicated in 339, is the oldest continuously used church in the Holy Land and one of the oldest in the world. Its crypt — the Grotto of the Nativity, a small cave beneath the basilica — marks the place where, according to 2nd-century tradition, Jesus was born. The fourteen-point silver star on the marble floor bears the Latin inscription: Hic de Virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus est — "Here of the Virgin Mary Jesus Christ was born." The church is administered jointly by the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, and Roman Catholic churches. The Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land keeps the Latin Mass at the adjacent Church of St. Catherine, and at midnight on Christmas Eve the Holy Father's Mass is broadcast from the grotto to the world.

Rome holds the relic of the Holy Crib — the Sacra Culla — in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, under the high altar, a tradition that the wooden boards were brought from Bethlehem by St. Jerome in the 5th century. St. Jerome himself, who translated the Vulgate at Bethlehem, is buried in the crypt beneath the Church of the Nativity. Nazareth, where the Annunciation took place and where the Holy Family lived, holds the other end of the Christmas story — the house where the angel came to Mary and the word was made flesh.