Simple Pageantry

On Christmas iconography

“She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.”

—Luke 2:7

I’m a sucker for crèches. I like to gaze upon them in churches, and am pleased that there’s one not far from the menorah at the center of my hometown. Sometimes there are also placards courtesy of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. (Whatever.) But in some sense, it’s the simple, even crude crèches that capture my imagination. My mother had a 99-cent plastic one in her living room for years that had been given to her by her mother, which is no doubt why it was so precious to her. The one pictured here is from a desk in my living room. I’m constantly having to rearrange the figures because they get swatted around by my hyperactive cat.

To some extent, the mythic power of the iconography comes from its surrealism. The angel up on high; the star guiding the three kings, who had to have wondered if they had the right address on that celestial GPS. But it’s the elemental force of the scene that moves me, the sheer biological force of a child born in a barn alongside a series of other living creatures whose existence followed laws of nature that had been laid down in some mysterious past that cannot be entirely explained. Four men—among them Joseph, who went along with one hell of a marriage ride that included a flight to Egypt and an inability to find lodging for his pregnant wife—beholding a mother’s power and the ineffable hope that accompanies the arrival of every healthy baby. And, amid this quotidian miracle, a notion that this particular child would have a life that changed the world.

Awe is a hard thing to come by in everyday life. I’m glad to seize it when I have the sense to apprehend it.