We've all been guilty of one or another. We have sentimentalized it and secularized it, which may not be such a bad thing, if what you mean by secular is that the story has entered into the culture we move through every day. We have visited it as tourists, filed it away as an interesting sight, and then forgotten it. The intellectuals have dismissed it as a charming, mythic folk tale. The right wing has made a court case of public manger scenes.
Biologists ridicule the virgin birth.
That's how personally we've taken it. Met in Jesus, the incarnate, the enfleshed word, the very presence of God among us. As long as I live, I'll remember my own father, not a religious man, transferring his giving instincts into making a perfect Christmas for us. He would always buy a few extra branch cuttings. Then, after balancing the tree and placing it in the perfect place and height, he would drill holes in the trunk and insert some of those extra branches artfully to balance the symmetry, to improve on God's work.