It fits in with all of the other warm and soft Christmas imagery about as well as a hair-sprouting wart on the tip of Mona Lisa's nose. It's not a detail of the Savior's advent that we eagerly retell to our own children again and again. For the most part, we read through it and move on as quickly as we can. Life confronts us with many issues upon which we ponder, but there remains a select few we keep coming back to again and again. Issues with which we particularly struggle in attempts to understand and make sense of.
Death is one.
The Christmas story contains all three. It's not hard for even the most adamant of agnostics to be drawn to the many icons of Christmas evoking love, mercy, and tenderness. Nevertheless, the real Christmas is more about warfare and battle than lullabies and carols. What God ordained in the Garden was now here. Satan's uncontested reign of fear, pain, suffering and death was about to be wrestled away and he wasn't about to give up without a fight.