You’re at a party and you have to introduce Mary and Joseph to everyone. You don’t say, “This is Mary, Joseph’s wife” but, “This is Joseph, Mary’s husband.”

The gang nods knowingly.

One person in the Christmas tale who doesn’t get a lot of press is Joseph, the foster father to the alleged Prince of Peace. He’s there but he’s not there. The spotlight in the celebrated crèche is trained on Madonna and Child.

Joseph has no lines in the Christmas pageant. He does what an angel tells him to do. Take Mary as your wife. Check. Name the baby “Jesus”. Check. Flee to Egypt. Check.

Put yourself in Joe’s shoes. A mere cipher in Caesar’s census. Blue-collar. Carpenter by trade. Your fiancé gives birth to a baby who isn’t yours but is born, they say, for everyone. Your mission is to raise this Holy Child for His true Father. A mission that is kinda outlandish but you accept.

Joe had the patience of Job. After all, Jesus would have slept under his foster father’s roof and ate his food. Who knows what Jesus might have been like had he been raised by a resentful, irritable role model? Jesus grew to be a fine man. Some would say the finest.

The last we hear of Joseph is when a pre-teen Jesus gets separated from his parents in the temple in Jerusalem. Legend assumes that Joseph died young. It is Mary, after all, who kept the lonely vigil at the cross.

I’ve always liked Joe. Obviously so did Saint Luke. Whereas Matthew’s gospel traces Jesus’ genealogy through his mothers’ line in deference to the doctrine that he was the Son of God, Luke had no qualms about tracing the line back through Joseph. (Luke 3:23-38)

Joseph comes off as sensitive and quiet. The night he assumes his fostering role, Joseph stands in the stable, a mere teenager with tousled hair, watching the cows in the corner with one raccoon eye and the two loves of his life with the other.

Like so many folks, he’s just there. He does what’s good and right. He makes sure that the family is okay. He doesn’t say much but worries a lot, content to stand in the shadows. What is important is not what he says, if he says anything at all, but his being there.

Joseph stands for all of us who might feel lost and impotent because we have nothing to say and not much to do. No choreography. No lines. But without us, the tableau would be incomplete.

The Bible says that Mary pondered everything in her heart and yet, however long he lived, Joe the carpenter would have taken the memory of that holy night to his grave and left us a valuable lesson.

When Christmas rolls around, what matters is not what you say, if there is anything to say; or what you do, as if it really matters what you do.

It is that you were there.