So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby,
who was lying in the manger.
—Luke 2:16
When I first heard the word crèche as a boy, I thought it was the name of some sort of new soda. I didn’t know it meant the Christmas manger or, as I learned in Catholic school, the Nativity. But I was not confused about the role the crèche played in my Christmas days of long ago.
Each December, my father pulled up from the basement a large metal tray. I learned years later that this was just an old oven tray that he had kept after my parents replaced the kitchen oven, but to me, this oven tray was the bedrock of Bethlehem.
“Who would like to help me build the Nativity?” my father asked each winter. My sisters, brothers, and I knew what was needed: moss, small rocks, twigs, and sand. We’d run outside in our hand-me-down winter coats, in our mismatched gloves, and scour the yard and woods for just the right stones and just the right moss, and then we’d rush to the kitchen, where our father stood beside the kitchen table. On it he had placed the large tray.
I liked so much watching as my father spread sand on the tray, and then he’d place the rocks we had collected to make a small cave, and the moss was the hills and the sticks were trees. Then my mother would step into the kitchen with a metal Christmas box filled with shepherds, sheep, Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus, and a small crib, and Bethlehem once again appeared in our house for the holiday season.
The word crèche, an old French word, ultimately derived from the German word for “crib,” and so from tradition to tradition and language to language we have inherited the modern image of the manger. Roe and I wanted to create our own traditions, so we decided to create our own version of the crèche, using our children.
Michael was nine months old (a perfect baby Jesus), Karen (a spitting image of Mary) was three, and David (a perfect Joseph) was five years old.
We hung a brown blanket over the windows of the small sun porch attached to our house. Karen’s veil was a blue towel; her dress was one of my T-shirts. David wore my belt as a headband and a brown towel over another of my T-shirts. He liked the large stick we found that he used as his staff. And Michael, we just wrapped him in a receiving blanket. We borrowed from the church a small crib that was used on Christmas Eve. We bought a bale of hay from a garden center, cut out a yellow star to hang above the scene, and there we were, standing before the crèche in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, in 1985.
I don’t care too much for the life-sized plastic crèches we see illuminated on people’s lawns. I confess that I wasn’t always crazy about the live manger scenes either. When I was a boy, my father and I visited a live crèche at the Methodist church that frightened me when Joseph turned, looked directly at me, and said hello.
In 1985, the United States Supreme Court allowed the crèche to be displayed on public property because there was “insufficient evidence to establish that the inclusion of the crèche is a purposeful or surreptitious effort to express some kind of subtle governmental advocacy of a particular religious message.”
The crèche, in the end, is all about a boy who grew up over two thousand years ago, who then went on to make a huge impact on how we human beings treat one another.
May you build your own nativity scenes with moss and stones. May all your future days blend joyously as we reach back each night to Bethlehem.
Blessed is the Christ child with us all.
Blessed is the Holy Family with us all.
Blessed is the Light of the World, for he is in us.