Parenting & Family Quote by Lucinda Franks

Bethlehem is doing double duty here: a real, contested place and a stage set for the West's most rehearsed story. Franks opens with "The ancient dream", a phrase that tips her hand as a journalist who knows how myths operate - not as lies, but as templates people keep trying to inhabit. The sentence builds like a carol: crisp night, dazzling star, incense, a cast of recognizable figures. Each detail is sensory, almost cinematic, and that is the point. The Nativity persists because it is easy to picture and hard to argue with in the moment; it offers an image of order and meaning that arrives pre-lit.

The subtext is a quiet tension between romance and reality. "Christmas in Bethlehem" is not only a postcard; it's a travel headline with history underneath it: occupation, checkpoints, competing claims on holy ground, tourism and theology braided together. By leaning into reverent imagery - "falling to their knees", "sweet baby" - Franks signals how powerfully the narrative still flatters the believer and the visitor alike. It invites you to kneel before innocence, to locate "perfect love" in a child rather than in the messy adult world where politics and compromise live.

"Incarnation of perfect love" is the rhetorical masterstroke: it compresses doctrine into a feeling. Franks isn't preaching so much as diagnosing the appeal. The dream is ancient because it keeps being needed - especially in a place where the distance between ideal and lived experience is impossible to ignore.