NATCHEZ — With Christmas Day comes the telling of a story so familiar, it has often been reduced a postcard.

Baby Jesus, born this day, slept in a manger filled with hay.

Cattle lowed. Angels sang. Three kings brought presents, and peace and goodwill were declared to all.

In the retelling, year after year, what was once called the “greatest story of all” becomes just another story, a sort of baseline tale that acts as an excuse for a broader season of — perhaps paradoxically — consumerism and good deeds.

“You have a secularization of Christmas, which is maybe part of the familiarity that comes with the story, that makes a religious event become a sort of ho-hum, we don’t give much thought to it, we decorate sort of event,” said the Rev. James Fallon, pastor of Holy Family Catholic Church.

And that can be a problem for those who believe Christmas is more than just a story.

“We as a society tend to associate Christmas with a lot of generic goodwill, like loving each other and world peace, thinking you should treat people better this time of year because it is Christmas,” said the Rev. Nance Hixon, pastor of Grace United Methodist Church. “It is easier to talk about things like love and hope and joy, but the center of Christmas is not any of those things.”

Some of the problem may be chalked up to the fact that the traditional feast of Christmas has somehow subsumed the Advent season, a time meant for Christians to reflect on the cosmic implications of what they believe Jesus’ birth means.

“It has always been meant to be the time in which we would focus by prayer, penance and good works, how we would focus our mind and heart on the meaning of Christmas, the coming of Christ to us in this gentle and humble form,” Fallon said.

“The incarnation is God coming to us and given human flesh in which every person, every human being can identify with Christ, because he came in our condition.”

That’s why Hixon said he thinks when Christmas is discussed, theological terms like “incarnation” should be expressly used because they are not part of the normal seasonal discourse, but those words do relay an important message.

“Christmas is about this staggering and kind of embarrassing idea that not only is there a creator, an almighty God of all the universe, but at one point he was a baby and he was keeping his parents awake and he smelled bad,” Hixon said. “God became a real life human being and was right there in that feeding trough.”

And therein lies the key for keeping the Christmas story fresh for Christians, Hixon said, the belief that it’s not just a tale, but rather a historical event that served as a paradigm changer.

“It is that concreteness, that material reality of it all, that if we will actually think hard about it and what a ridiculous, beautiful idea it is, that might help us focus on something of the meaning of Christmas and not get lost in our porcelain nativities and our merriment and our holiday compassion for folks,” he said. “Those things are good, but they might not always touch on that central truth that is really the heart of it all.”

Beyond the single moment of the Christmas story encapsulated in Nativity depictions everywhere are details, little hints at a much broader story. The Rev. Jeff Brewer, pastor of Parkway Baptist Church, said this Advent season he has seen the story anew by examining individual aspects of the scene.

“You always hear in the story of the birth of Christ ,that they wrapped him in swaddling clothes,” Brewer said. “I never realized that swaddling cloth is the very same material they used to wrap the dead bodies of the day. Christ would be born, and instead of being wrapped in a fine garment, he was wrapped in the cloth of the dead bodies — he was born to die for the sins of the world, and this sort of hints at that.”

Likewise, Brewer said the linguistics of the Bible hint that the room in the inn in which Jesus’ parents were famously denied welcome is the same type of room in which Jesus spent the last night with his disciples before he was crucified.

“For most Evangelicals or Christians in the United States, we attach the two moments in the Christian life to be Christmas and Easter, and to find those two instances in correlation in the text was a sort of renewing for me,” he said. “Everyone who is a Christian — and even those who are not — knows some semblance of the Christmas story, but it is neat to start filling in the details. It is a new dynamic that really kind of ties it together in a sense for me.”

Fallon said he believes the religious element of Christmas is a grace that changes hearts, and for believers who make an effort to really examine it, the story will be more than a postcard stuck to a refrigerator.

“Sit down and thank God for coming as one like us, who understands the human condition and bears our burdens,” he said. “I think that is the message of the humility of the birth, being fully human and bearing our conditions. This is the condition of Christ’s life, it culminated in the cross, so thank God for his beautiful, gentle presence among us.”

That presence began, Christmas says, with a familiar scene of a baby in an animal’s food trough. But familiar doesn’t have to mean old and worn.

“Saint Paul tells us that the Gospel is ‘foolishness to the Greeks,’ and it is a really crazy idea,” Hixon said. “It is something totally new and unexpected, with earth-shaking — that’s not big enough — with incredibly profound, universal implications, and at the heart of all that is Mary burping God after he ate.”