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Valley View Community Church pastor Ed Algya tells children and others the religious symbolism of the candy cane as it relates to its shape, colors, flavor and hardness during a Sunday service.

Last year Pastor Ed Algya of Valley View Community Church gave a sermon on the four Grinches that can steal the spiritual meaning from Christmas: shopping for gifts, financial worries, the busyness of the season and general stress.

"We all have so many different things we are dealing with as individuals that it can really rob the focus of anything meaningful," said the Rev. Tim Morris of Alive in Christ Lutheran Church. "We’re running around getting presents and decorating. If you’re not careful … then the joy of Christmas really becomes the fact that you don’t have to go to work, you can breathe for a minute. The reality is this is the busiest time of year when it should be the slowest."

The story of Christmas is one of the great mysteries of the Christian faith, said Pastor Travis Tamerius of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church. "The mystery is that God became flesh."

Algya of Valley View gave a sermon in early December that borrowed from the Santa Claus story entitled "Naughty or Nice."

"The true gift was God sending his son Jesus Christ to save us, redeem us from our naughtiness," Algya said.

The story of Jesus Christ’s birth can be found in the book of Matthew 1:18 and in Luke 1:26 in the New Testament of the Bible. The story begins with a young virgin named Mary who is betrothed to Joseph, a carpenter in Galilee. When Joseph discovers Mary is pregnant, he begins to think of breaking off the engagement, and at that moment an angel appears and tells Joseph that the child Mary is carrying is the son of God.

Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem after a decree is issued that all must register in their home cities with the Roman government, where Mary ends up giving birth. The Book of Luke says she wrapped her son in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, where the family was staying because there was no room at the inn.

The child is said to first be seen by shepherds in the area informed by the angel of Jesus’ birth. Eventually the family flees to Egypt when an angel tells Joseph that King Herod desires to kill the child.

"Every minister is trying to be faithful to the tradition that’s been received but also trying to be able to present it in a new cultural context," Tamerius said. "What does it mean to Christians today living out this message?"

"Our culture gives us a lot of opportunity to apply the same old story to new and changing cultural dynamics," said Morris of Alive in Christ Lutheran. "But you have to do your homework. You have to know your people and what they are going through."

The Rev. Thomas Saucier of St. Thomas More Newman Center said maintaining the joyous, hopeful feeling of Christmas can be tough when trying to communicate the story in today’s context: the Iraq war, economic hardship and senseless mass murder at a mall and churches.

"You don’t want to have a preacher lament on one thing after another," Saucier said, adding that many people forget Jesus was also born in to a time of conflict.

"Not everybody was happy under Roman authority. There were certainly a lot of haves and have-nots. When you read the Gospels, people think they lived in this pristine world, that Mary and Joseph were immune from that kind of thing. The reality is that’s not the case," Saucier said. "A lot of what they were going through … is still going on. Unfortunately, in some ways, people don’t change. People were fighting 2,500 years ago, and people are still fighting today."

The ministers all said that this time of year, however, there is a Christmas-inspired hope that enters all corners of American society.

"Traditionally and factually it has been proven that more people are more interested in spiritual things this time of year than any other time of the year," Algya of Valley View said.

With that interest, though, can come a heightened expectation from pastors to communicate a transcendent hope, Saucier said.

"They are searching for hope, obviously. They are searching for a sense of meaning in the midst of the busyness of the season," said Tamerius of Christ Our King Presbyterian.

"In a month, material stuff is not going to matter," said Morris of Alive in Christ Lutheran. "The great opportunity of this time of year is we might just have an opportunity for God to whisper some truth and joy in our hearts, more than other times of the year."

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