This is my beloved saguaro crèche, a manger scene on top of desert cactus, carved by a young artist from Oaxaca, Mexico. It sits all year round in a prominent spot on a bookcase as you enter my apartment-hermitage. The three Wise Men do not bring gold, frankincense, and myrrh on Epiphany but far more practical gifts: a chicken, a fish, and a pig!

These past Twelve Days of Christmas, ending on Epiphany, I’ve been meditating  on the meaning of the Magi’s gifts: gold for Christ our King, frankincense to worship him as God, myrrh as we anticipate his death. Theologian Karl Rahner says the gold represents love, the frankincense reverence, and the myrrh suffering, including our own.

Bede Griffiths, the Benedictine monk who founded Shantivanam, a Christian-Hindu ashram in south India, creatively describes these Epiphany gifts as if they come from Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists around the world. (Dave Denny and I discuss this in more depth in Podcast #18, “Christmas Joy and Gladness,” which you can listen to here.)

But what if the Magi had been Wise Women instead of men? According to a popular vignette, the three women would have “asked directions, arrived on time, helped to deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, made a casserole, brought practical gifts and there would be peace on earth!”

This imaginative retelling of the old story helped me see how often our Christmas carols, poems, and stories focus on the meaning of the gifts the Magi bring to the Christ Child, and how the gifts are intimately related to the cultures in which we live.

The little drummer boy is so poor, he has no gift to bring, so he gives what he can and plays his drum for Jesus. Looking through the pages of Nativities of the Southwest, a gorgeous book I received this year on the Second Day of Christmas, I marvel at the gifts the Pueblo Indian Wise Men bring: blankets, turquoise, corn, and chilies. The Navajo bring salt, cornmeal, and prized Blue Bird flour.

In The Gift of the Poinsettia by Pat Mora, new to me this year, little Carlos is so impoverished, he can only bring the drab green poinsettias growing around his favorite rock. As he weeps over them on Christmas Eve, which the Mexican people beautifully call La Nochebuena, the petals turn brilliant red. As Aunt Nina says, “Love is magic. Love makes small gifts special.” This story also clearly shows that Christmas is not about receiving gifts but about giving them.

I’ve always loved O. Henry’s short story, “Gift of the Magi,” a poignant tale of the husband who sold his watch to buy his young wife a set of combs for her long lustrous hair while she cuts her hair to buy him a chain for the watch. Henry calls them both Epiphany’s “foolish children” but then concludes: “… of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.”

I usually weep when I hear the carol “In the Bleak Mid-Winter.” A haunting melody, an evocation of harsh weather, cold, and dark: “Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.” And in another lyric from the poem by Christina Rossetti, that question again: “What can I give Him, poor as I am?”

Then the carol gives an answer for all of us in all times and places: “What I can I give Him,” I give Him my heart. Nothing else will do.