“Peace and goodwill towards men ...”

Some day, said the author and philosopher C.S. Lewis, all of us are old enough to start reading children’s stories again.

The writer of such enduring children’s fare as The Chronicles of Narnia was not, in fact, shilling his own books to adults.

Rather, Lewis, a devout Christian and an equally devout humanist at the same time, was referring to the myths and fables that have shaped and informed the world we live in.

He was talking about the stories that bind communities and countries together, the ones passed down from generation to generation and which provide the basis for shared traditions, customs and cultural touchstones.

Lewis was absolutely right, of course, about the stories from our youth that we should be obliged to revisit as adults.

Certainly at this time of year, we could all do worse than to reread the accounts of the birth of Jesus in the gospels of Luke and Matthew.

The tale of the Nativity lies buried somewhere beneath the seasonal avalanche of plastic reindeer lawn decorations, tangled Christmas lights and ugly sweaters which engulf Bermuda every year at this time.

Frankly, there are many in Bermuda who now regard the whole Christmas period as a collective exercise in bad faith.

For a growing number of local residents, it’s a time when it seems everyone has tacitly agreed to ignore what everyone knows to be true: namely, that this is an overly commercialised and entirely denatured holiday when the great reservoir of public credulity gets filled to overflowing once again.

The net result is always the same: it amounts to people spending money they don’t have on presents, food and decorations they can’t afford in the self-deluding belief that the more credit cards they max out, the happier the results will be.

And gossip about who got kissed under the mistletoe at the office Christmas party (and who ended up dancing with the lampshade on his head) tends to be entirely more prevalent than reflections on the central miracle of Christianity.

But it is precisely that miracle which makes the promise of Christmas, a Christmas stripped of the ornaments and eggnog and treacly songs, so relevant and so very appealing to many others in Bermuda, Christians and non-Christians alike.

For them the holiday celebrates that sense of hope which ought to accompany the birth of every child — and the potential all children have to redeem a sullied, unredeemed and sometimes seemingly irredeemable world.

They respond to the Nativity’s intrinsic appeal on some deep, almost atavistic level.

It taps into rich veins of idealism and hopefulness that lie buried deep within them — whether they regard Jesus of Nazareth as a Messiah or a great moral philosopher or simply a superbly realised fictional character in a morality tale for the ages.

Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author and essayist who describes himself as an “agnostic, semi-observant, bacon-eating Jew”, has often told the story of how he committed the second chapter of Luke, verses eight through 14, to memory when he was a child:

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

“And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

“And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

“And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and goodwill towards men.”

Chabon has noted how “no amount of subsequent disillusionment with the behaviour of self-described Christians, or with the ongoing progressive commercialisation of Christmas” has robbed Luke’s version of the Nativity story of its power to move him the way any truly great story can.

“If the subsequent years have brought as much disgrace as glory to those who have accepted or claimed to accept the promise of Jesus’s birth,” he has said, “I don’t think it does anyone any harm to hear the promise itself: a statement of hope, forgiveness, and love among all the people of the world.

“On the contrary, it breaks my heart every time.”

Remove all of the glitz and glitter, the extravagance and the artifice, and this is the actual heart and soul of the Christmas holiday: a celebration of hope capable of transcending time, place, race and creed.

This is what C.S. Lewis meant when he said the lasting value of such powerful and long-lived myths is that they take all the things we know “and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity”.

Which is precisely why he went on to suggest that none of us are ever too old to start reading children’s stories again.