We were in church the other day, singing Away in a Manger, when my youngest son had a surprising question.<\/p>\n
“Daddy,” he whispered. “What if Jesus wasn’t born in a manger?”<\/p>\n
I leaned close to hear him better. “What?”<\/p>\n
“What if one of the inns had had a room?”<\/p>\n
I thought about it for a second. “The song sure would be different.” I said, laughing.<\/p>\n
After church, as we walked to the car, I started to sing. “Away in Bob’s hotel…”<\/p>\n
He laughed, and he and his brother joined in, singing “a crib for a bed.”<\/p>\n
“The little lord Jesus lay down his sweet head.” We sang together.<\/p>\n
“Sleeping in room four oh eigh-eight,” my oldest sang.<\/p>\n
And then it just got silly, with the wise men waiting politely outside the hotel room, and shepherds driving their flocks through town to see Him.<\/p>\n
Thinking about it, though, the descendants of those innkeepers must be pretty frustrated. I mean, imagine if one of them had said “sure, come on in.” Not only would the place have been mentioned in the bible, but it would be in a beloved Christmas song.<\/p>\n
Talk about great publicity!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every once in a while, the kids give me a glimpse of a different world, a much sillier world. Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123,118,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-sS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1790\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}