I don’t have much time to do this, but God is finishing up a heavenly stroll around the universe He does once every thousand years and now is probably my only chance to tell you my side of the story. The REAL story of how Christmas came to be: Mary’s Christmas… my Christmas.

Here’s how it all happened: I was living a good life — hanging out with my friends at the synagogue and enjoying my hobby of collecting rainwater outside my house. Heck, I was even betrothed to some carpenter named Joseph. I didn’t think life could get much better.

Until one day, at a ripe age of 13, all of a sudden, I started getting weird visions while catching locust for dinner. The visions were so intense that I had to stop what I was doing and skip supper.

I was with God’s child and I was favored by God. You’d think I would be praised by my family. The LORD was coming! … Nope!

I was shamed for having any kid out of wedlock, even God’s kid. I constantly had to dodge stones the second I left my house. It got so bad that I ended up building a fort to hide from my parents in, in our one room house. I just wanted to have a normal life and go play tag with the other kids! Instead, I sat at home, hoping God would send me some fun angelic visions to keep me occupied (He didn’t).

And after all I’d been through, we had to run away from some dudes trying to kill my precious baby (and by extension… ME). You’d think God, being all-powerful, would’ve smitten them so they couldn’t get to His son! Or at least arrange a nice place for the mother of His child for when she gets there. But no, we got to Bethlehem and all there was available was a smelly broken down manger with way too many donkeys. (God is way too poetic sometimes.)

I didn’t even have sex out of wedlock, but the childbirth hurt like HELL; I was afraid I was actually having the Anti-Christ it hurt so much. To make matters even worse, these strange, non-relatives show up. They wanted to hold the baby and offered me oddly expensive presents in exchange for holding him. Umm… NO, some other random dude wanted to KILL my baby. I just kept asking them if they could please leave, but they laughed at me because I was a woman.

I’m not bitter. I just figured since I was favored by God, I’d at least get mentioned a bit more in His book. I raised the kid, after all, as a teen mom. Not even God wanted to do that! I must’ve done a phenomenal job at it, too considering people are still talking about it 2,000 years later! I was there for little Jesus for everything, from when he learned how to convert water into wine to when the kids called him “manger boy.” And don’t even get me started about how many times he snuck out of playgroup to go heal some lepers! (We got kicked out the fifth time he did this!)

I know, I’m not nearly as important as God, but I DID raise His kid in all His holiness. So I never understood why Jesus gets all the movies or why all the religious leaders who make real decisions are male?! It’s like I didn’t even help him study Hebrew for ten hours straight before his bar mitzvah while I could’ve been perfecting my challah making skills! And, damn, it hurts!