Most of us have seen the Folger's Coffee ad on television. A young man with an armful of packages gets out of a car and lets himself into the front door of a house. When he touches the light switch, the lights go on, on an enormous Christmas tree.

A little girl upstairs who heard the car door close races down the steps and into his arms. Everybody's asleep, she says. He says he knows a way to wake them up. They go into the kitchen. He gets out the big can of Folger's coffee. By the time he has brewed a potful and is sipping from his cup, all the grown-ups upstairs have smelled it and are beginning to come down. The young man's mother sees him, and they rush into each other's arms.

"Peter," she says. "Oh, you're home!"

Home for Christmas.

What is it about Christmas that makes us all want to be home with our families? I heard some folks talking about it. One woman said she had seen an article about a survey. The survey found that Christmas is the one time of year when most people want to be home. It leads birthdays by three to one and the Fourth of July by almost five to one.

Has it ever struck you as ironic, in the face of this, that the holiday we want to spend at home was built around a man and woman who had a Child away from home? And, in some ways, the Child in this case was even more away from home than His parents, because He had left the glory of the heavenly world to be born in a mere stable in Bethlehem.

But I have a friend who may have thrown some new light on this matter. He is Kenneth E. Bailey, a Middle Eastern expert who resides at the Ecumenical Center for Biblical Studies in Tantur, only a few miles outside modern-day Bethlehem. In an article published in The Presbyterian Outlook (Jan. 4-11, 1988, pp. 8-9), Bailey reinterprets the narrative of Jesus' birth from the perspective of one who has spent most of his life in the Middle East.

He notes that in Luke 2:7, which says there was "no room in the inn," the Greek word for "inn" is actually kataluma, which means "guest room" and does not imply a hostelry. Later, in the story of the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan takes the wounded man to a pandokheion, which does mean "inn" or "hostelry." If Luke had meant to say "inn" in the birth narrative, he would have used pandokheion, not kataluma.

What we Westerners need to understand, said Bailey, is the arrangement of a typical Middle Eastern house. In such a house, the living room often doubles as a guest room; if there are overnight visitors, they sleep in this room. Adjacent to this room, but at a slightly lower level -- as in a split-level house -- is a rough, outer room into which the family's animals are usually brought at night, especially during colder weather. In the morning they are led away and the room is swept. Another feature of the Middle Eastern home is that the manger for the animals is built into the floor of the upper level, or living-room level, so that the animals can reach it but cannot walk in it.