In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it…And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
+St John the Beloved Apostle (John 1)
[W]e must understand that our whole life should be an "advent." in vigilant expectation of Christ's final coming. To prepare our hearts to welcome the Lord who, as we say in the Creed, will come one day to judge the living and the dead, we must learn to recognize his presence in the events of daily life. Advent is then a period of intense training that directs us decisively to the One who has already come, who will come and who continuously comes.
+St John Paul II
Jesus has chosen to show me the only way which leads to the Divine Furnace of love; it is the way of childlike self-surrender, the way of a child who sleeps, afraid of nothing, in its father's arms. A God who became so small could only be mercy and love.
+St Thérèse of Lisieux
That the Creator is in his creature and God is in the flesh brings dignity to man without dishonour to him who made him. Why then, man, are you so worthless in your own eyes and yet so precious to God?
+St Peter Chrysologus
There are two births of Christ, one unto the world in Bethlehem; the other in the soul, when it is spiritually reborn. Men think of the former much more than the later, and celebrate it every year; but the spiritual Bethlehem is equally momentous … It was the second birth that Saint Paul insisted on when he wrote from prison to his beloved people, the Ephesians, asking that Christ may dwell in their hearts by faith and that they be rooted and grounded in love. This is the second Bethlehem, or the personal relationship of the individual heart to the Lord Christ.
+Ven Fulton Sheen
For I wish to recall to memory the little child who was born in Bethlehem. I want to set before our bodily eyes the hardships of his infant needs, how he lay in the manger, how with an ox and ass standing by he lay upon the hay.
+St Francis of Assisi (discussing his vision of creating the first nativity creche)
(Also St Francis, who wanted Christmas to be celebrated as the “feast of feasts”: I would like that on Christmas even the walls could eat meat!)
Mary, your beauty has delighted the eye of the Thrice-Holy One. He descended from heaven, leaving His eternal throne, and took Body and Blood of your heart, and for nine months lay hidden in a Virgin’s Heart. O Mother, Virgin, purest of all lilies, your heart was Jesus’ first tabernacle on earth.
+St Faustina Kowalska
What greater cause is there of the Lord’s coming than to show God’s love for us? If we have been slow to love, at least let us hasten to love in return.
+St Augustine
A helpless Newborn Child in a lowly cave restores dignity to every life being born, and brings hope to those overcome by doubt and discouragement. He has come to heal life's wounds and to restore meaning to death itself. In that Child, meek and defenseless, crying in a cold and bare cave, God has destroyed sin, and planted the seed of a new humanity, called to bring to fulfillment the original plan of creation and to transcend it through the grace of redemption.
+St John Paul II
Sadness should have no place on the birthday of life. The fear of death has been swallowed up; life brings us joy with the promise of eternal happiness. No one is shut out from this joy; all share the same reason for rejoicing. Our Lord, victor over sin and death, finding no man free from sin, came to free us all.
+St Leo the Great
P.S. And I'm sneaking in this gem from my girl Flannery: "For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified."