The photo stared down at me from the bulletin board above my daughter’s desk. I was visiting for Christmas, using her desktop to check my e-mail. The face in the photo was framed in chopped-off orange-dyed hair. The girl wore an ugly old plaid flannel shirt and a scowl, an angry adolescent with just a hint of fright in her eyes. The face on the wall was her face, half a lifetime ago. She’ll turn 30 in a week.

Now I visit for Christmas and she cooks the Christmas goose. I play with my grandson, 2 years old and a genuinely sweet presence, a child who already, instinctively, says ” ‘ank you” when you get him a drink of milk and “Sorry, Daddy” when he accidentally whops his dad with the cupboard door.

And my daughter? Now her wavy hair cascades over her shoulders and her voice is soft. She noted her little boy’s nurturing instincts and bought him a little-boy doll to take care of, and a little blue-painted vintage doll bed for him to sleep in. She arranged the doll carefully under the tree for maximum surprise and wonder on Christmas morning.

So all Christmas Day, little Felix crawls into the fold-out bed in the study/guest room with his new baby, saying “Good night,” closing his eyes for five or 10 seconds, then bouncing out again with a cheerful “Good morning!”

I wonder if he can even recognize the face on the wall. He has no idea what he has wrought.

It has been a gradual change, of course. I don’t think she could have stayed that angry and lived. She had her reasons – one of those unlucky teenagers who had to face tough things in those years that are tough enough all by themselves: the breakup of a marriage, too many moves to new places and new schools, a mother preoccupied with younger kids. Over the years, she has gentled gradually, but the edge remained.

She still favored the holey men’s undershirts her generation insists on calling wife-beaters, preferably grungy white ones with a black bra underneath, and garish polyester thrift-shop skirts. Her vocabulary was still punctuated with four-letter monosyllables or their participles, several times per sentence. She still smoked.

Then Felix happened, and the whole surface of my daughter became velvety, her heart finally loosed from its hiding place. Last weekend, for the first time since she was a little child, I heard her sing. She was singing to him.

And just when I think I’ve mined Christmas for all it can give me, and its simple story for all its lessons, it delivers yet another. God appearing as a child has always made sense to me. Calling out to us from this innocent, vulnerable place, he appeals to the good in us as no authoritarian wielder of thunderbolts could do.

And ever since his arrival, I’ve known that Felix is our child in the manger, and that God comes to us this way, over and over, and softens us, and demands our best selves to be served up for him.

Here’s the new thing I found out this year. God is that innocence. It isn’t just a prank to trick us into goodness, this appearance as a baby, as all babies, preying on our nurturing instincts. God needs us to protect him.

Through the swagger of political speeches, through the cacophony of economic indicators, through the physical and emotional violence all around us and the discrepancies in fortune, through the stupid sleep of the satisfied, he keeps on doing what God does: being a baby. Being a lot of babies, each of them perfect and needing love, living on in our grownup selves too, understanding the basic things that life tries to leach away: Despite the wrongs you suffer, find reasons to be good to each other. God’s alive in all of us, but he needs help to survive.

In my daughter’s eyes, 15 years ago, he is in trouble, but he’s there. Today, he’s playing with his baby doll, doing what loved children do, reminding us all of our joyful duty: Be soft. Be merry, and silly, and try not to swear. Oh yes – and sing.