I had deleted this suggestion, among other things, to keep the essay focused on the baby in the basket:

"A question for another time, was Jesus advocating a rejection of money altogether? A moneyless society like those described by Melville and Thoreau?"

The tradition I grew up with interpreted 'Give Unto Caesar' as the world having a material plane and a spiritual plane, and that the material plane is not important because it is finite, so we shouldn't worry about accumulating wealth here. However you read it, the statement expresses a kind of condescension towards money, regarding it as an image-bearing idol, a golden calf.

That last point is the relevant one here. I couldn't throw away that passage entirely because "Give Unto Caesar" is a perfect metaphor for our annual ritual of paying tribute to the multi-nationals.

I just wanted to throw that other reading in there. As you write in your Christmas essay, readers add their own interpretation to a piece. The present situation in Palestine suggests new readings for those old texts.