MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Let me tell you about the Christmas traditions in my family that have actually stuck — and the ones that didn't. The ones that didn't stick: the elaborate coordinated Christmas Eve dinner I attempted exactly once before accepting that takeout pizza is also a form of grace. The advent calendar I bought with great intention on December 1st and forgot to fill past December 8th. The ones that stuck: reading a Christmas story aloud o

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ There is a moment on Christmas Eve — usually somewhere between the wrapping paper anticipation and the late-night church service — when the house gets quiet enough to gather everyone together. If you're anything like my family, that moment is sacred. My wife Amy and I have four kids. And from the time they were small enough to sit still in pajamas with damp hair from the bath, reading Christmas stories aloud together has been one

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I have a confession to make. I've been singing "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" since I was old enough to stand in a church pew and hold a hymnal with both hands. I sang it in children's programs, in Christmas Eve services, in shopping malls when Muzak was still a thing. I've sung it probably hundreds of times over the course of my life. And it took me until my forties to stop at the second word. Herald. Not heavenly. Not happy. Not

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ When I was in the final stages of writing MARK! The Herald Angel — when the story was essentially done and I was reading it through for the last time before releasing it to the first readers — I asked myself a question that I think every writer should ask before they let a manuscript go: What do I want the person who finishes this book to feel? Not think. Not know. Feel. Because thinking and knowing are good and important, but the

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ There is a pastoral challenge that almost nobody talks about directly, but that almost every pastor faces in December: The people in your congregation — the ones who have been coming to Christmas Eve services for thirty years, the ones who can recite Luke 2 from memory, the ones who have heard the nativity preached from every angle available to a human preacher — have developed a kind of protective familiarity with the story. They

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Let me make the case that you should read a Christmas book this summer. I know how that sounds. I am aware that the Christmas music doesn't start until at least November 1st and that the retail decorations, while arriving earlier every year, have not quite crept all the way back to July. I am not suggesting you put up a tree or start wrapping gifts or do anything that would alarm your neighbors. I am suggesting that July, specific

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I spent years in the world of animated children's content, and it taught me something that I find myself returning to constantly as I think about the future of MARK! The Herald Angel: the difference between content that families watch once and content that families return to every year for the rest of their lives. That difference is not production quality. It's not budget. It's not even the sophistication of the animation. It's wh

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I want to tell you about the Christmas I almost ruined by trying too hard. It was a few years into having four kids, which means it was the season when I was theoretically most experienced at Christmas parenting and practically most in danger of overcomplicating it. I had ideas. I had a list. I had ambitious plans for traditions and experiences and meaningful moments that would be remembered forever. By December 20th, I was exhaus

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Mark the Herald Angel does not want to go to Earth. He makes this abundantly clear on the bus ride home from the Eternal Herald, after his editor dismisses his story and hands him an itinerary with a single word on it: Earth. He mutters about it. He slumps in his seat. He crosses his little arms. He is, in every particular, a being who has been asked to do something he did not sign up for and does not want to do. He is, in other w

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I know what you're thinking. It's June. The Christmas music isn't even in the stores yet. The last thing you want to do is think about December. And you're right — mostly. I'm not here to suggest you start shopping or decorating or planning your Christmas Eve menu. That would be absurd, and I have more respect for your summer than that. But here's something I've observed in years of ministry and family life: the families who have

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Luke 2:19 is one of the shortest and most quietly devastating verses in the entire Christmas narrative. The shepherds have just left. They arrived frantic with wonder, spilling over with an account of angels and heavenly armies and a message about a baby who is the Savior of the world. They shared everything they'd seen and heard. And then they left, going back to their flocks and their night shifts and their ordinary lives, glori

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ One of the things that makes a character transformation believable — and I've thought about this a great deal in the course of writing MARK! The Herald Angel — is that the character being transformed must be entirely sincere about who they are before it happens. Not performatively resistant. Not waiting to be convinced. Not secretly hoping someone will come along and shake them out of their rut. Just genuinely, completely, absolut

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ There is a phenomenon that happens in churches when an entire congregation — across all ages, across all small groups, across the whole range of life stages and backgrounds that make up a healthy church community — reads the same book in the same week. I've seen it described different ways by different pastors. Some call it a sense of common language. Others call it a shared emotional temperature. One pastor I know described it as

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Every story lives or dies by the reality of its world. Not reality in the sense of factual accuracy — fiction is fiction, and the rules of fiction are different from the rules of journalism — but reality in the sense of internal consistency, specific detail, and the feeling that the world you're reading about existed before you arrived and will continue existing after you leave. The world of MARK! The Herald Angel is called Paradi

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Every year the calendar separates Easter and Christmas by about eight months, and in the cultural imagination they end up feeling like two entirely different holidays with two entirely different emotional registers. Christmas is warm and anticipatory and domestic — candles and carols and the smell of something baking. Easter is solemn and triumphant and outdoor — lilies and sunrise services and empty tombs. And yet. I've been thin