Nativity Scenes

    Every year about December 25 I haul a large cardboard box of decorations from the garage into the living room. It is time to prepare the house for Christmas. I can do it with my eyes closed, hanging wreaths, lining window sills with pinecones and candles, and clearing off the mantle for the most important Christmas prop of all - a large wooden manger with the figures of the Nativity scene inside. Every year I ask the same question: Where is it? 

    I have a habit of misplacing things unless they're large, like cars, or permanently glued down, like Jesus, Mary and Joseph upon the manger floor. Too unwieldy to fit into the cardboard box with all the other decorations, the manger could be anywhere - on a shelf, behind the coats in the hall closet, or maybe upstairs under the guest room bed. From one Christmas to the next it is never in the same place. Then again, neither am I. 

    This is not to say that every Christmas is entirely different from every other. I give and go to parties, buy presents and track the whereabouts of my children more carefully than at other times of the year. If they are not home on December 25, I want to know why. But whereas I used to spend an enormous amount of time and energy getting ready for Christmas, in the spirit of one preparing for a final exam, I no longer look upon it as a test that I must pass or perish. In fact, I try not to look at it at all. 

    This attitude toward Christmas began to take root twenty years ago, when I was newly separated with three small children to get through the holidays. To compensate for our change in circumstances, I strove hard to turn the house into a sugarplum vision. I bought yards of red ribbon to tie around swags of pine on the banisters, wrapped an extra set of twinkly lights around the tree, and spent money I didn't have upon a second-hand upright piano so we could sing Christmas carols around it. Then I bought a book of carols. That was a mistake. 

    Written by a woman who, among other homespun virtues, sews her own clothes by candlelight from wool she cards from her own sheep, this was not just a book of carols but a rich anthology of stories, recipes, and ways to have a meaningful Christmas - although I could not help but think that it helped to live in a snow-covered corner of Vermont among a large extended group of relatives. My heart ached as I read about how they feed their birds their Christmas treat on St. Michael's Day, put on an annual marionette show, and always drink hot chocolate around the wood stove in the kitchen after the men drag the Christmas tree in from the forest. 

    It was the word "always" - with all the continuity and sense of being part of an unbreakable tradition that it implied - that got me down. Intellectually I was aware that even in the best of lives, "always" inevitably gives way to 'sometimes" which finally gives way to "nevermore." But when I placed the Nativity scene upon the mantle, I was painfully aware of what we were - a broken family in the midst of a season that celebrated wholeness. 

    It was a hard holiday, but not without its gifts - chief among them being the decision to stop trying to live up to my own or anybody else's preconception of how or what Christmas ought to be. Rather than chase Christmas like a lover that must be wooed or lost, I have found it much easier to sit still and let Christmas find me. 

    Every Christmas has had a different face. One year it looked like the Cambodian student who came to stay because his family had been wiped out by the Khmer Rouge and he had no place to go. Another year the doorbell rang several days before Christmas and a young apple-cheeked girl in Birkenstock sandals asked if she could rent a room until she had her baby. (That year our own Nativity scene was particularly close to the one on our mantle.) And some years it doesn't look like anyone at all. 

    It is considered a terrible thing to be alone at Christmas, but the holidays I have spent in the company of a candle and the sound of Handel's Messiah in a quiet house are no less important to me than those when every bed in the house is filled. The secret of celebrating Christmas is to empty oneself of all expectations so that there is room for the unexpected, or even the miraculous - like a star over a stable - to appear. 

    Last year I decided that for my party I would have a child's Christmas - which was, in effect, a re-enactment of my own. Every Christmas Eve all the youngest cousins in the family were lined up upon the stairs and given candles, and at the sound of the first chords of "Silent Night" we processed into the living room where we knelt before the Christmas creche. One of the children was always chosen to tell the story. Usually, he or she came a little too close to the truth. 

    Last year was no exception. When ten-year-old Miranda Longaker got to the part about Mary being told by the angel that she was going to have a baby, she rolled her eyes and said, "Well, you know, Mary was a virgin and she didn't know what was going on. But she said, well, all right, if that's what God wants, I'll go along with it." A deep collective chuckle filled the room. We sang a few more verses of "Silent Night," blew out the candles, and went in to supper where we sat around the table - broken pieces of the human family, feeling miraculously whole.