Check out what Rowan Williams actually said to the Times here.  It's nothing new to anyone who knows what the Bible actually says - and it does what I'm meant to be doing on Christmas Day - challenging the 'faithful' to see how much they have absorbed traditions and legends as gospel.  I am doing a 'truth or tradition' quiz, with pictures, and blow me down if Archbishop Rowan hasn't picked up all the same themes.  Bah, candy canes!

And yet... I recall reading a theology book about five years ago (alas I cannot remember which - Sean please help me out you made me read it!) that took a more hopeful approach to this, that actually in the Christmas card scenes, in the nativity play synthesis, God actually reveals new things to us: the ox and ass link us with Christ as the saviour of the world (kosmos) not just the people on it, that the shepherds and kings together in the stable point us to the fact that in Christ there is neither Jew/gentile, slave/free male/female.  The layering and glittering may in fact add to, not detract from, the truths of the story.

So, Rowan Williams is absolutely right about legends and traditions, and yet God, being God, can still speak through them.  Yeah, way to go God!  Mystery and wonder - exactly what all this is about, and what the good Archbishop hints at anyway.