711bet How Babies Teach Us to Be Human

Every year as I’m unpacking my grandmother’s nativity set, I hide the ceramic baby in a drawer. My grandmother installed the baby in the manger on the first day of Advent, but it’s a tradition in this house to wait till Christmas morning. I like the reminder of an empty manger: Advent is a time for waiting.

When my youngest was hardly more than a baby himself, it became his job to hide the nativity baby from all of us and bring him out again on Christmas Day. My boy had solemnly claimed this responsibility for himself, and I couldn’t hurt his feelings by reassigning it to one of his older brothers, who might be less apt to drop a ceramic figure that could never be replaced. But unlike the shepherd and the wise man, whose heads are now glued on, and the cow, who is missing both horns, the baby is still in one piece all these years later. It may qualify as a Christmas miracle that my grandmother’s baby Jesus still spends Advent safely tucked into a drawer.

It’s the old nativity set, mended but still itself, now merged with memories of my own babies in Christmases past, that makes me marvel every year at the perfection of the Christmas story. If I were trying to write a story of love and belonging and healing, a story for all — whatever they believe, whoever they might be — I hope it would occur to me, too, to start with a baby. For how is it possible not to love a baby?

This is what babies do: They make us love them. No matter how closed our hearts, no matter how battered and crusted over with scars, along comes a baby and the carapace softens. A baby fills us with more love than we knew we were capable of feeling. Again and again, we scoop the baby up and hold it close to us, feeling its small head nestle into the small hollow above our own collarbone. Again and again, we undo its swaddling clothes and marvel at its tiny red feet.

Over the years, Ms. Judd told her son extremely little about her missing husband, who remained unaccounted for until May of this year. The Defense Department said earlier this month that her husband, Staff Sgt. John A. Tarbert of the Air Force was killed at 24 after his plane was attacked while flying over Germany 80 years ago this Friday.

Just when its exhausted parents have reached the edge of sleepless sanity and are now poised to tumble into the abyss, the baby looks into their eyes and breaks into a gummy smile. No one has ever smiled at them with such pure, unadulterated love as this baby is smiling now.

A baby in a grocery cart spies the next person in line, and suddenly the baby is wreathed in smiles. If you are the next person in line, no matter how tired, no matter how fearful of what might be happening in the world or in your own life, you smile back. A baby turns every stranger into a friend. You don’t have to want a baby of your own. You might not even like babies very much. None of that matters when a baby smiles at you. You can’t help yourself: You smile back.

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