Today in the first day of Advent. We don’t have many traditions for house decorations. We don’t do a tree but we feel the house is empty without it. Our lives and our living room do not support a tree, even a fake one. I hope one year to get the front room together to the point where we could have one, but I am not hopeful.
The one thing I do do is set up my family nativity scene. It is the nativity scene I grew up with. The set was made in Japan. My church uses the exact same set at a larger scale. The basic set looks like this:
I believe one of the sheperds has gone missing over the years. This is the set I grew up with, but not my only set.
There was a large youth program in my church growing up, and the Christmas pageant was a big event for the year. The sixth graders played Mary, Joseph, Wisemen, recalcitrant innkeepers, etc. My sixth grade year I played both a King and a Shepherd. pretty much everybody played a shepherd unless they needed to be somewhere else. The Blue King was my first solo in church, singing one of the verses of “We Three Kings” as I crossed the room.
There were also three years the younger grades sang the parts of the animals. One grade were the sheep, the next weer the cows, the next were the oxen. I don’t remember the exact order but the figurines are labeled by year, so I should be able to reconstruct the whole thing.
There were two points in our lives where we sang in the angel choir. The first time was when, as toddlers, we were dressed in good oldfashioned red and white and paraded in front of everyone to sing Jingle Bells. We were given bells. We Jingled. To this day my mother tells the story of my first time in the church, getting so exciting about jingling my bell I fell over. I guess I was always a goofy show-off.
Later we sang in a different choir. There is a figurine record of this as well.
These may well be some of my oldest possessions. The blue one is dated 12-74. I was three years old. The styles changed over the years. The one in red with actual features was the figurine we had my last year in the choir. I just happened to be at Lorraine Nason’s house when she (and presumably my mother) were painting the figurines to be given to the children and to keep me busy they gave me one to paint.
The recent years have made Advent a strange time. We are supposed to be preparing for what is to come, and what is already here, and we are also supposed to be doing everything from parties to extra services to shopping shopping shopping. It is a time meant for making space but we fill the time with distractions. Our lifestyle precludes us from the Advent Wreath, we do not light the candles, we do not go through the books, although we have several.
But I still put up this nativity every year. It is a small space, hopefully one that will remind me to make space in other parts of my life for the more important things than work.