The cardboard Nativity was stored in a cardboard Christmas card box. When I was a child, I set up this scene of Jesus’s birth. I unfolded the three-section base to lay flat on top of Mom’s small living room chest with drawers. I raised the many one-inch tabs to make sure they stood straight. The hardest part was to stand the three-sided stable in the slits cut in the tabs. Thru the years those slits wore out and wouldn’t hold up the stable that was about 6” tall and 10” wide. So it was propped up in the back with a skinny jar of jelly that Mom said no one saw. The two landscape desert scenes leaned backward, almost touching the wall.
Then I placed the people and animals in slits on the tabs as labeled. Baby Jesus in a cradle in the center of the stable and Mary and Joseph beside him. A shepherd boy, two sheep, a donkey, a cow, and three Wise Men all had their places. Now, six decades later, those tabs are much more tattered and the dessert scenes and stable are propped with toy wooden building blocks. And it’s okay if anyone notices.
In another Nativity, one Wise Man’s crown is chipped. It’s shorter on one side so this Wise Man stands behind the other two. A dab of gold paint covers the crown’s white jagged ceramic edge.
For 47 years, this Nativity, that Husband and I bought the second year we were married, has been part of Christmas. Most of those years, baby Jesus slept in his cradle between Mary and Joseph and the three Wise Men stood outside the wooden stable. But when Daughter and Son were young and placed the figures, the Wise Men stood close to Jesus. Closer than the shepherd boy and his sheep. Closer than the cow and donkey. The Wise Men carried gifts and Daughter and Son thought they should be closest to the newborn baby.
As Daughter and Son got older, the Nativity characters often moved. Mary and a Wise Man switched places or the cow and donkey disappeared – hidden away. My children laughed about how long it took me to realize something was amiss.
A few years ago my oldest Grand said to me, “You know, Gran, the Wise Men weren’t there when Jesus was born. They shouldn’t be close the stable.” David said the Kings should be across the room until after December 25. “So maybe you could start moving them closer about a week after Christmas.” And that’s what happened.
A few days ago, four-year-old Jesse stood with his elbows propped on the table in front of the ceramic nativity. My Grand’s chin rested inches from baby Jesus. “Gran’s had that a long time. It’s always here,” Jesse’s big sister Lou told him. “Don’t play with it, but you can touch and move the people and animals.”
Lou is right. The Nativity is always here and it can be touched.
####
Susan Writes 
Leave a Reply