From Fox News:
There are three well-known accounts of Christmas in the New Testament. We have St. John’s austerely metaphysical version (“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”). And we have the more narratively dense tellings in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Unique to Matthew is the reference to the Bethlehem star, the massacre of the innocents and the visit of the Magi. And peculiar to Luke are mentions of the census, the stable, the swaddling clothes, the shepherds and the angels. Most of us, when we imagine or depict Christmas, manage to mash together Luke’s and Matthew’s renderings.<[scroll for more:]
But there is a fourth Christmas story in the New Testament, though it is rarely appreciated as such. Found in the 12th chapter of the Book of Revelation, it makes no reference to shepherds, Magi, or swaddling clothes, but it does speak of a birth and of a dragon. The portrayal of Christmas in the Revelation is not abstractly metaphysical, but it is not straightforwardly narrative either; rather, it is highly symbolic and apocalyptic. One might say that it is the view of Christmas from God’s perspective, from the highest possible point of vantage.
[SD note, Verse 12: “A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; 2 and she was with child; and she *cried out, being in labor and in pain to give birth.
3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: and behold, a great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads were seven diadems. 4 And his tail *swept away a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she gave birth he might devour her child.”]