What I Want Families to Feel on Christmas Morning— And How a Story Gets Them There
- Glenn Fletcher
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
✦ 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 they don't carry people through a Christmas morning. What carries people through Christmas morning is something felt in the chest rather than processed in the mind. Something that makes the familiar things feel briefly new, that makes the ordinary weight of the day feel — just for a moment — lighter and more significant than it otherwise would.
That's what I was trying to give people with MARK! The Herald Angel. And I want to tell you what I was hoping for, specifically.
The Thing About Christmas Morning
Christmas morning is, for most families, a beautiful and slightly complicated thing.
It's beautiful because it's Christmas. Because there are children — or the memory of being a child — and gifts and anticipation and the particular warmth of a family gathered together at the same time in the same place for a purpose that everyone agrees is worth gathering for.
And it's complicated because Christmas morning arrives after weeks of preparation that have been, to varying degrees, exhausting. Because the gifts, however carefully chosen, will not quite match the vision. Because the family dynamics that exist in ordinary time are still present in festive time, only with added pressure. Because the gap between the Christmas we imagined and the Christmas we're actually having is always at least a few degrees wide.
What I want for families who have read MARK! The Herald Angel is that this gap narrows on
Christmas morning. Not because the circumstances are different, but because the frame is.
The story of a grumpy little angel who was sent somewhere he didn't want to go and found the most extraordinary thing in the universe waiting for him there — I think that story does something to the heart that makes the imperfect Christmas morning feel less disappointing and more like a stable in Bethlehem. Which is to say: completely wrong on the surface, and exactly right in every way that actually matters.
(story continues after ad)
What Stories Do That Sermons Cannot
There's something that stories do in the human heart that propositions and arguments, however sound, cannot do.
Stories take up residence. They move in and stay. They shape the lens through which we see
subsequent experience, not by making arguments but by giving us characters we've lived with and worlds we've inhabited — frameworks of meaning that operate below the level of conscious thought.
A person who has read MARK! The Herald Angel and then wakes up on Christmas morning has Mark somewhere in the back of their mind. Not necessarily consciously — but there. The story has become part of how they hold Christmas. The image of a tiny reporter finding the King of the universe in the last place he thought to look, giving away his most prized possession, discovering a song he didn't know he had — that image is alive somewhere in the person's heart.
And when Christmas morning arrives with all its beautiful complications, the person who carries that image inside them has something that the person who doesn't carry it doesn't have: a story that rhymes with the moment they're in.
That's what I wanted. That's what I was trying to give.
And if you've read the book and found it — then you know what I mean.
✦ MARK! The Herald Angel — a story to carry into Christmas morning. Available in print, eBook, and audiobook at MarkTheHerald.com. Download the free Advent devotional at
Comments