The Christmas story in chronological order, scene by scene

The Christmas story runs from the angel Gabriel’s visit to Zechariah in Jerusalem, through the Annunciation in Nazareth and the birth in Bethlehem, to the shepherds, the Presentation in the Temple, the visit of the Magi, the flight into Egypt and the return to Nazareth. Luke and Matthew each tell part of it.

Luke supplies the angels, the census, the manger and the shepherds. Matthew supplies Joseph’s dreams, the Magi, Herod and Egypt. Neither Gospel tells the whole story, which is why a single chronological order has to weave them together.

One step is debated. Luke 2:39 has the family return to Nazareth after the Presentation, while Matthew keeps them in Bethlehem until the Magi come. Most harmonies place the Magi after the Presentation, since Herod targets boys “two years old and under” (Matthew 2:16).

The Christmas story begins in the Temple in Jerusalem, where the angel Gabriel tells an elderly priest, Zechariah, that his wife Elizabeth will bear a son, John. Six months later Gabriel visits Mary in Nazareth. Mary then hurries south to Elizabeth, and in Matthew an angel reassures Joseph in a dream.

These opening scenes are quiet and domestic. A priest struck silent at the altar, a young woman at home in a village of a few hundred people, two pregnant cousins greeting each other in the hills.

The Christmas Nativity Story coloring book opens in exactly that world, before any angel speaks. You color Mary drawing water at the well in a Nazareth courtyard, with clay jars, a loom and a donkey behind her, and the caption explains how ordinary that daily work was.

Luke says a Roman census ordered by Caesar Augustus sent Joseph to Bethlehem, the town of his ancestor King David, about 90 miles south of Nazareth. Mary went with him. While they were there she gave birth, wrapped the baby in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger, “because there was no room for them in the inn.”

The word translated “inn” is the Greek kataluma, which Luke uses again for the upper guest room of the Last Supper. Many scholars read it as a crowded family guest room, with the birth in the lower part of the house where animals were kept. No innkeeper appears in the text.

The date is uncertain too. Matthew places the birth under Herod the Great, who died around 4 BC, so most historians put it between about 6 and 4 BC. The census Luke names, under Quirinius, is a well-known puzzle for that dating.

In the book you arrive in Bethlehem at dusk, with woodsmoke rising over the hilltop village, then duck into a stable cave with straw on worn stone. One page holds only a pair of hands wrapping the swaddling clothes, the most intimate scene in the story.

The shepherds came on the night of the birth. Luke says they were living out in the fields near Bethlehem, keeping watch over their flock, when an angel announced “a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord” and a multitude of angels sang “Glory to God in the highest.” They went at once and found the child in the manger.

Shepherds were working men of low status, which is the point of Luke’s scene: the first witnesses are the poorest people in the story. They leave “glorifying and praising God,” and Mary “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.”

The coloring book puts you by their fire. You sit at a crackling acacia fire in the fields east of Bethlehem, the flock settling under a sky full of stars, and pick the colors of a night that is about to change.

Forty days after the birth, Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem for Mary’s purification and to present their firstborn son to God. There an old man, Simeon, took the child in his arms and blessed God, and the aged prophetess Anna spoke about him to everyone waiting for Jerusalem’s redemption.

The offering they made gives away their circumstances. Luke records “a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons,” which the Law of Moses allowed for families who could not afford a lamb (Leviticus 12:8).

Simeon’s prayer, the Nunc Dimittis, is still sung at evening services today. Churches mark the day on 2 February as Candlemas, which closes the Christmas season in many traditions.

The wise men, or Magi, arrived later than the shepherds, possibly up to two years after the birth. Matthew says they found the child in a house, not a stable, and never says how many came. The number three comes from their three gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Matthew calls them magoi from the east, a word used for Persian priestly scholars who studied the stars. They stop first in Jerusalem to ask Herod where the king of the Jews has been born, which is how Herod learns of the child.

Calling them kings came later, drawn from Psalm 72 and Isaiah 60, and the names Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar appear in the West centuries after the Gospels. The Feast of the Epiphany on 6 January marks their visit.

Their caravan is one of the most absorbing pages in the book: a line of camels winding across moonlit dunes, carrying chests of frankincense and myrrh, resins tapped from Boswellia and Commiphora trees in southern Arabia.

After the Magi left, an angel warned Joseph in a dream that Herod meant to kill the child, and the family fled to Egypt. Herod ordered the killing of every boy in Bethlehem aged two and under. When Herod died, the family returned, but avoided Judea under his son Archelaus and settled in Nazareth.

Matthew reads each move as a fulfilled prophecy: “Out of Egypt have I called my son” (Hosea 11:1), Rachel weeping for her children (Jeremiah 31:15), and “He shall be called a Nazarene.”

Luke closes the infancy with one line: the child “grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom.” The next scene in the Gospels is twelve years later, in the Temple. For everything after Nazareth, follow the life of Jesus in chronological order.

Much of the familiar Nativity scene comes from later tradition, not the Gospels. The Bible gives no date for the birth, no number of wise men, no innkeeper, no ox and donkey, and places the Magi in a house. These details grew over centuries of sermons, plays, carols and paintings.

The cave tradition is old and specific. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, begun under Constantine in the 4th century, stands over a grotto that pilgrims have venerated as the birthplace ever since.

The living Nativity scene is credited to Francis of Assisi, who staged one with a real ox and donkey at Greccio, Italy, in 1223. Most Nativity sets under a Christmas tree trace back to that night.

None of this makes tradition wrong, just later. For how the familiar faces themselves were imagined, see what Jesus looked like according to the historical evidence.

Advent 2026 begins on Sunday 29 November and runs 26 days to Christmas Eve. Color one scene of the Nativity story each evening, in chronological order, and you reach the manger on Christmas Eve. The Christmas Nativity Story coloring book has 20+ scenes, so a few nights are left for finishing touches.

The last pages step out of the Gospels into the traditions that grew around them: the four candles of the Advent wreath, and a stone church lit by beeswax candles as the congregation sings Silent Night, first performed in Oberndorf, Austria, on Christmas Eve 1818.

The scenes are built around warm light, lanterns, campfires, starlight and candles. Straw, worn stone and rough wood reward a little texture work: our guide to how to color texture covers all three.

The PDF downloads instantly, so you can print the first week’s pages tonight and reprint any scene for children or grandchildren coloring alongside you. Every page starts as AI-generated art and is checked by a person before it goes in the book. Human Validated, no melting hands.

Color the Christmas story

The Jesus Christ and Nativity bundle (€29.90 for both PDFs) carries the story on after Christmas, from Nazareth to the empty tomb. For anyone who loves the season, it is a gift that skips the verse-on-a-mug cliché; more ideas in Christian gifts that aren’t cheesy, and how to wrap a printable in how to gift a printable.

Two Gospels, three towns and Egypt, well over a year, and a cast that never all stood in one stable at once. Read in order, the Christmas story is stranger and more moving than the crib scene suggests.

Print the first page on the first Sunday of Advent, start at the well in Nazareth, and color your way to the manger by Christmas Eve.