Let's hear it for the child.

The little girl who lives upstairs had a birthday party. I brought up a small present and found serious, blond-haired Sonja surrounded by Grandma and aunts and cousins, tearing through a pile of bright packages.

Something about the growth of children makes grown-ups wistful over the passage of time. "It hardly seems eight years ago. I remember so well the day she was born," I said to Sonja's father. "We heard you and Anne go off to the hospital in the middle of the night, and we were all excited. Then I ran into you on the steps the next morning, and you didn't even say anything, remember? And I said `Well? What is it?' and you looked a little dazed and said, `It's a girl,' and I started clapping, I was so happy." "I remember," said Kurt. "I was so exhausted by the time I got home from the hospital I couldn't even think. But you were all excited, and it suddenly hit me just how wonderful it was -- a baby daughter."

At that moment I looked at Sonja over on the sofa. She had put down the presents and was listening to us, her eyes shining. The story we were recounting was a simple reminiscence for us -- but for Sonja, clearly, it meant much more. People clapped for joy when she was born, we were telling her. And her father remembered "how wonderful it was."

I think about Sonja every year when I listen to the Christmas gospels. Like the memory Sonja's father and I share, the Christmas story is a birth story. Its dramatic events -- the journey to Bethlehem, the stable, the star, the angels, the worship of the shepherds, the Magi, the fury of Herod, and the flight into Egypt -- all mark the importance of this child.

He is, the stories tell us, a child born to simple folks, his birth celebrated by the heavens, feared by earthly princes, full of promise for all people. Theological treatises can lay all this out in abstract language. But the stories make us see it; they give us marvelous details to hold onto and turn over in our hearts, just as Luke's gospel tells us Jesus' mother did.

Most children don't come into the world celebrated by angelic hosts and astronomical wonders. But the beginning of each ordinary life is still a once-for-all-time extraordinary event. Telling the stories is a way to tell children just how special they are in our fives and in God's creation -- and to give them important clues about themselves.

My son, for example, was born after a short, hard labor. When they put him in my arms he was all red and squiggly with masses of thick black hair, and I laughed out loud in joy, relief, and sheer delight at his comical appearance. It's a story he loves, because it confirms that his truly wonderful gift for making people laugh goes right back to the first minute of his life.

On the day I was born, my grandparents took my father to the race track. My dad was never much of a gambler, but that day he won big on the first race. Resisting the temptation to play out the streak, he collected his winnings and went directly to the hospital gave the money to the cashier, and said, "This is to pay for my baby daughter." Okay, so I was born before most people had health insurance, and in a time when a hospital birth cost a few hundred dollars. But the story also tells me something that makes me smile: that, to my father at least, I was a lucky child.

Other birth narratives stress pain and difficulty. Mothers may get hazy on the details, but the memory of the waves of overwhelming pain that drive everything but womb and child never goes away. Then there are all the sagas about journeys through snowstorms and traffic jams that rival anything the Magi faced. But those can make great stories too.

One of my favorite Christmas stories is one this magazine ran, some years back, by Garrison Keillor. It tells of a Lake Wobegon family, the Tolerudes, who adopted an orphan child from Korea. The whole family -- mother, dad, and six kids -- drove down to Minneapolis and spent a day hanging around the airport and killing time in nervous anticipation. By the time the plane carrying the baby. finally arrived, everyone was laughing and crying and trembling and exhausted, and the baby as she was carried down the runway "looked like an angel sent from heaven, which of course she was."

Other families I know have traveled to Mexico or China or have endured journeys through years of fertility treatments or bureaucratic paperwork. Think what those stories say to the children: you are so important to us that we were willing to go to great pains to bring you into our lives.

The shepherds and the Magi (and me clapping my hands for Sonja) all point out another important element of birth stories: the welcome. My sister, for example, went into labor on Memorial Day, when the rest of the family was at a barbecue. She called from the hospital, and we all squeezed into the room as my mother took the phone: "It's a girl!" my mother cared out. She started crying, and the whole family -- aunts, uncles, cousins, Grandma, Great-Aunt Harriett -- let out a mighty cheer. What a story we'll have to tell Mary Kate when she's old enough to understand.

Finally, of course, birth stories like these are about identity. They tell us who this person is. The Bible tells elaborate birth stories for such figures as Moses and John the Baptist to frame their roles in history, as deliverer and prophet. Jesus' birth story identifies him as the Incarnation, God's love becoming one of us. The angels had it right: it is such good news that people have been telling it ever since. It is our birth story too, as a people saved by God's love.

When we tell it this year, maybe it's also time to tell those other stories, of human love that reflects and fulfills God's love and in the process, with pain and shouts of joy, brings babies into the world to share in it all.