Ways of looking at the Nativity.
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John 1:14, New King James Version:
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us
And we beheld his glory
The glory as of the only begotten of the Father
Full of grace and truth.
My translation, from the Koine Greek, of the same passage:
And the Word became flesh and dwelled IN us
And we saw his [its] RADIANCE
Radiance like that of an only child born from A father
Full of grace and truth.
The first chapter of John's Gospel begins with, and then interpolates, three sections (including this one) of an early Christian hymn predating the rest of John and possibly predating even the other evangelists' texts. A beautiful and subtle song, it represents a vision of the Savior before theological power struggles codified Jesus (who always called himself the Son of Man) as being himself God, or as being one of the divine Trinity.
The hymn identifies Jesus as the Word, but what is that? In its most basic form, the Word is the Greek Logos, which represents a gathering together, as one gathers together thoughts and then speaks words, which serve to convey the thoughts. In the same way, God gathered his light together, and employed the human Jesus to convey the light to humanity. The Greek uses pronouns and pronominal adjectives for the Word that can be either masculine or neuter.
So "the Word became flesh." But although the Word had already served as agent for creating the world, "the world did not know him [it]" (1:10) when Jesus came. A few, however, "saw his [its] radiance," in Greek doxa, which refers to the shining of the sun, bringer of all light and life. The Word not only became flesh in Jesus, it poured from him to dwell literally IN some of us (rather than only "among" us as one human being), so that those who accepted the light could see its radiance in one another.
The radiance shone in the same way that the face of an only child shines for his or her father -- a face that singularly emits a father's own light. (The Greek text uses no definite article, so it reads "a father," not "the Father.") In this way, the light becomes a sign of family, both human and divine. Grace and truth are byproducts.