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But in this digitized post-modern age, amid war and terror, layoffs and inflation, even the faithful must sometimes wonder: Are miracles real?
In the spirit of the season, the Herald went looking for the answer, and found three members of the local clergy willing to volunteer sincere opinions on the subject.
One is a Jewish rabbi; one is a Methodist minister; the other is a Roman Catholic priest.
Their opinions are hereby offered in the same random order they were obtained.
The first comes compliments of George Morris, senior pastor of the Haddonfield United Methodist Church.
"It's a subject people share with me; they'll talk of something happening to them they believe to be miraculous, either physical healings or healings in relationships," Morris said. "They pray for and believe in miracles. They are part of our Biblical history.
"But to be honest, they are not the kind of thing you see everyday, where Mary had cancer and the next day it was gone," Morris said. "In my own life, I considered it miraculous when there was a healing of memories."
The pastor candidly recalled a spiritual crisis in which he found it difficult to forgive someone who had "deeply wounded" him.
"After a year of counseling, I eventually I came to terms with what was going wrong and was able to forgive the person who had wounded me so deeply," he said. "But, as I said, it came after a year of counseling; it wasn't an instantaneous or spontaneous kind of thing."
Still, he said, "it felt pretty miraculous once the whole thing lifted and I wasn't afflicted with depression again.
"Many people pray for healings and don't receive them in terms of a specific problem going away," he said. "Our faith is a lot like jazz, in that it never resolves."
That's not to say he is not prepared to affirm the stories of people who have been blessed to experience a good old-fashioned water-into-wine kind of miracle.
"But there are other people who don't understand why after they pray situations don't change, and I cant give an easy explanation to that either," he said. "People able to keep going and rise above what ever their particular malady is, and still be people of faith, that, to me as a minister, is pretty miraculous in itself.
"Some would call it a miracle; others would just call it human stamina," he said. "I choose to believe it is God at work in people's lives."
The next is offered by Father Tom Kiely, a priest at St. Rose Of Lima Roman Catholic Church in Haddon Heights.
"Well I have had a lot of miracles," Kiely said. "You can see miracles in many different ways. Webster's dictionary defines it as just a beautiful thing. I think of miracles as extraordinary things that happen within our ordinary lives.
"Through the power of our smile, we can heal and that's a miracle," the priest said. "The interaction through people, kind words and smiles and love for one another, through such things, I've witnessed healings, physical healings."
But the priest's belief in miracles goes farther than smiles or kind words. He points out that the essential dogma of Catholicism requires faith in the overt miracle of converting bread and wine into the body and blood of God-made-man.
Meanwhile, a netherworld of pseudo-miracles exists, wherein relics like the Shroud of Turin evoke skeptical reactions from scholars of both science and theology. The Vatican passed on that one, but through the ages it has both authenticated and promoted a dizzying array of everything from holy apparitions to stigmatas. And in their wake have come modern-day charlatans bearing weeping icons and pizza slices whose swirls of cheese reflect the mottled profile of Virgin with child.
However fanciful all that may seem, Kiely said he knows what he knows. He cited the Eucharistic Miracle of Lanciano, Italy. At the heart of this story, he said, a man starts as skeptic and winds up a believer.
"It was 1,200 years ago and there was a priest who doubted the miracle of the Eucharist," he said. "One day, at Mass, he found that the Eucharist became an actual heart muscle and the wine had become actual blood.
"It is blood in every sense blood is blood," he said. "It has remained type 'A' blood. You can actually go there and see it to this day."
One can go to Europe and see the "uncorrupted" corpses of the saints, he said.
"Some, like St. Bernadette, look as if they had just passed away," Kiely said. "And there was Padre Pio, just made a saint, who in life had the stigmata. For 50 years, he had quarter-sized holes in his hands and feet."
Members of his family, he said, had met Pio while he was still alive and residing in Italy. They were, Kiely said, stunned by how ordinary Pio seemed.
"He was an extraordinary human being, yet he was a very ordinary human being as well," the priest said. "And that is a little like the Christmas miracle. God came into our lives as an ordinary human being, too."
Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, begins this year on Dec. 25 - just as the Christmas season is closing out.
Perhaps, then, it is fitting that the final opinion be offered by Rabbi Yitchok Kahan, director of Chabad of Medford, and youth director for Chabad in Camden and Burlington Counties.
"We as Jews realize that we are not in control, that God is in control and that everything that happens is a product of God," he said. "There are a lot of things we look at in this life and we think they are natural occurrences but they really are all the hand of God.
"The idea of a miracle is to just give us a boost," he said. "We have seen many miracles in the Torah. They are there to inspire us, to remind us that God is there for us in every single moment."
