I recently had the opportunity to see a wonderful Christmas drama called “Journey to the Manger” at Ocean View Baptist Church.

It was a full-on musical production filled with great songs, a terrific story and solid performances by the cast and choir. It also contained an important message for any Christmas, but especially this year’s holiday season: It’s not about the gifts.

People have been celebrating Christmas for centuries in all sorts of ways, and “Journey to the Manger” provided snapshots of Christmas celebrations throughout history.

Even during the Great Depression, people who were hungry, out of work and desperate were still able to celebrate the birth of Jesus, even managing to give humble gifts of handmade sweaters or other small tokens.

In Victorian England, Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, brought the tradition of the Christmas tree over from Germany, and the custom of decorating trees spread throughout the world.

The trees even had a symbolic meaning—the evergreen representing eternal life, the candles meaning Jesus, the light of the world. Never knew that did you?

As the play points out, gift- giving wasn’t yet a custom during the Renaissance, but somehow, the joyousness of the holiday season was alive and thriving. It was a time of classic architecture, beautiful religious art and a newfound emphasis on the relationship between humanity and God.

Christmas was about a celebration of this “rebirth,” not about giving presents.

The Ocean View play presented pictures of all these places in time to a modern, cynical businessman, the show’s protagonist, who doesn’t believe Christmas is anything but a celebration of materialism.

Toward the end of the production, the man is taken back to the first Christmas, stripped away of all the modern conventions, to a smelly stable in a small, Middle Eastern town where a savior came to earth in the most vulnerable way imaginable—as a helpless baby born to young, dirt-poor parents who were promised a miracle.

That, Joseph and Mary tell the cynical modern man, is what Christmas means.

The gift-giving and the carols and the family get-togethers are great ways to celebrate, but even without them, Christmas is about something so much simpler, yet so much more.

“Journey to the Manger” was just one of several local productions celebrating the “reason for the season” this year, and I was happy to be able to see it.

This week, my daughter is once again portraying an angel in our children’s Christmas drama at our church. It’s definitely not a big-budget production, just something we like to do every year to remind the kids about the first Christmas and the meaning behind all the hoopla.

My Christmas wish is with the economy the way it is, more people will be able to see that meaning and feel something beyond the joy of receiving gifts—something that lasts.

sarah shew wilson is a staff writer for the Beacon. Reach her at 754-6890 or swilson@brunswickbeacon.com.