BLOG #51, SERIES #3

WEDNESDAYS WITH DR. JOE

OUR NATIVITY SET

December 19, 2012

It started long ago in Guatemala City, that Christmas of 1947. My father was a missionary, and my mother home schooled me and my brother Romayne; it would be here that our sister Marjory would be born.

How well I remember that first Christmas in Guatemala’s capital city. The bells. The bells. The bells. Our parents found getting acquainted with new people in a new culture to be rather difficult. Not so for Romayne and me, for we spoke the universal language of children around the world, roaming at will in and out of each others’ homes. Each time I’d enter one of their homes, inevitably we’d end up in the very heart of the home—and there would be the creche—or a Nativity set. My friends would approach it softly, almost reverently, as though it were a holy place. There would be no Christmas tree as there was in my home, nor presents. Presents would arrive on Day of the Wise Men—or Epiphany—on January 6. The Magi would bring them.

I remember feeling shortchanged: how come I felt closer to the Christ Child in these Catholic homes than I did in our Protestant one? Finally, I confronted my parents with my concerns. Their answer was almost immediate: they took me to the vast “mercado” and set me loose. It being the Christmas season, there were Nativity figures and creches everywhere, in all price ranges. After studying them all, I bargained for each one (for to accept the initial price would have been to deprive both the vendor and myself of the joy of haggling). Finally, when the vendor had shrieked maledictions at me, and declared I was depriving his children of the food they so desperately needed in order to stay alive—we’d settle, each convicted we’d got the best of each other. “Greedy Gringo,” the nicest thing he said about me. My parents would stand afar off, pretending not to know me, and unable then or ever after to play the grand game. And so each hard-fought battle would end with more Nativity figures (brightly colored Magi, sheep, camels, angels, shepherds, Joseph, Mary, and the Christ Baby). At home I reverently assembled them in the focal center of our home, and proudly showed the Manger scene to the neighbor kids. At last, I was one of them!

Each Christmas, the honor of setting up and taking down the Manger scene was mine—until some years later, in the Dominican Republic, when I returned, alone, to study in California. During those following years, I’d miss—a lot—that much-loved Christmas tradition. So much so that when I graduated from college, married my lovely bride Connie, and settled down as a junior high teacher in Placerville (an old mining town in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains), I determined to round up a Nativity set as much like the Latin American set I put together all those years ago as I could find. Miraculously, I assembled an almost carbon copy of the old one.

It is still with us. And each Christmas we once again gently unwrap each figure and position them around the crude stable. They’ve moved to Sacramento; to Huntsville, Alabama; to Keene, Texas; to Nashville, Tennessee; to Boulder, Colorado; to Thousand Oaks, California; to Annapolis, Maryland; and to Conifer, Colorado. Those long journeys have taken a real toll on our Nativity grouping: one camel died in transit; a second had a foot amputated (we have to prop him up so he doesn’t fall over). Besides Mary, Joseph, and the Christ Baby, we still have five curious sheep, a shepherd with a lamb curled around his neck, six Magi—three standing afar off (being three times the size of the originals—purchased them in Mexico one Christmas), three angels (one hanging on a Stable nail, one standing, one kneeling), a donkey, a cow, a dog; and the latest added just today by Connie: a quizzical furry fox.

Christmas has come once again to our home. And the Little Lord Jesus is at the heart of it.

Wishing you—each and all— a Blessed Christmas!