Nearly every culture dreamed of it: a virgin would conceive, a god would come to Earth and show us justice, and healing and peace would come at last to mankind.
Nobody could make all of the elements work into one great story, but humanity knew what we needed. We dreamed of it, longed for it, tasted it in the sweat of daily life.
Reality finally took a hand and the Love that undergirds everything made the dream real. Christmas is the beginning of it all. . . the solution dreamed of becoming fact. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth came to Earth because these Ideas exist in a Mind: the Mind of God . . . and that Mind is motivated by Love.
Christmas was better than our dreams, not just because it was real, but because God did the utterly unexpected and became fully Man. He brought Heaven back into union with Earth using a real Body, a real Human Soul, and His Divine Nature. He made them One in Himself without confusing them to fix them and make them right.
The beauty of Christmas is not just marketing, but real. That reality opens many doors . . . including helping us take our own stories seriously. The best are images of that great Image and so have something to teach.
If beauty does exist, and if we can know it because of the Fact of Christmas, then there might be disciplines, learning traditions, which can teach humanity about this aspect of reality. Just as science studies physical truths, it could be that art, poetry, literature, and music describe (in their own terms) aspects of Beauty. Real beauty opens the possibility of taking fairy tales seriously without thinking them “true” in a scientific sense.
What is the reality behind the Cinderella? It turns out that fairy tales are trustworthy guides to reality and what is in popular entertainment has ruined modern vision. The unchanging world in which humans were created resonates with the fairy tales which get at Beauty through the tool of fiction. Fairy tales correspond closely enough to God’s real world that humans created in the image of God can be lead through them to truth. Such myths act as sign-posts to one aspect of His great and complex creation. The stories scientists tell are accurate in different ways and point to different aspects of reality, but both science and fairy tales are incomplete pictures of one great whole.
The Incarnation, the baby in the manger, brought the two realities together for men for the first time since the Fall. 
There is at least as much good description of reality in Lord of the Rings, Hamlet, and Harry Potter as there is in most Social Studies textbooks. The history text speaks of the Prince of Denmark who lived in space and time. It uses one set of tools to find one aspect of reality: historic truth. The play Hamlet does not speak of this prince, but of an image of that prince created by Shakespeare. This image does not teach the history of Denmark, but about problems a man faces and does this analysis beautifully. Since men posses both immaterial souls and physical bodies and the cosmos contains spirits and material objects, the whole truth about men and nature must contain a space-time description of what bodies have done and what souls have done. Feelings and beauty are real.
This is the reason the traditional college or university demanded a thorough grounding in both the arts and sciences. Human knowledge is incomplete and fallen. In Utopia, perfect knowledge of a single particle of water could be used to infer the ocean, physics, the pleasure of hearing waves crashing on a beach, and the fears of Odysseus lost on the great wine-dark sea, but Utopia is no place where humans live.
There are not two truths: physical and spiritual. It is simply that there are many ways to come to the one knowable truth for limited human beings. Science works well in coming to one aspect of that reality and poetry is good at another. Simple minded folk try to reduce everything to what can be shown by one or the other means. The Incarnation, Christmas, is the basis of the unity of the University . . . and our starting point back to knowing the real unity of the Universe!
This Christmas as I love my family, as we share the joy of the season, it can be a joy that is mythic and real. . . magical and scientific. . . miraculous and Socratic. . . thanks to a tiny baby, God-Man, born on Christmas night.