Getting the house ready for Christmas

Getting the house ready for Christmas

We have a new Advent tradition at our place: we get the house ready for Christmas.

The house Jesus was born in.

A couple years ago the young people in my congregation made a model of a typical first-century Palestinian peasant abode, starting with a large cardboard box and opening it up like a doll’s house. The flat roof is a loft or upper room—kataluma in the Greek (Luke 2:7 and 22:11)—where guests would stay, accessible by steps along the side of the house.

The back corner of the main floor is where the elder members of the multi-generational family would have resided. The youth made tables and chairs out of shoe boxes, and wooden Scrabble tile holders serve as benches. One outside wall has a fireplace, complete with magic-marker red flames, although most of the food preparation would have taken place outside in a courtyard formed by several such houses.

The elders’ corner was also the starting point for sweeping the floor across to the opposite corner where the animals would have been installed. This is where bodily functions took place—including the birthing of babies—and it would have been handy to lay a newborn in a manger, or feeding trough, lined with fresh hay. Which is to say, as the gospels do (Matthew 2:11, Luke 2:7), Jesus was born in a house, the part where the animals were kept, just like every other poor first-century Palestinian child.

Given that Jesus was a child of color, there are several nativity sets—all fair-trade—that are ethnically accurate: one from Bangladesh includes sturdy clay characters with brown faces and dark hair (www.createdgifts.org), and one from Java has tall wooden figures whose bodies are painted light brown (www.tradecraftshop.co.uk). I personally like the set handcrafted with care by Paragon Ceramics in Dedza, Malawi; no two figures are the same, and each one has a captivating expression. In one set Joseph is hugging himself with joy, and in another he is kneeling and his mouth is exclaiming, “Ohh!” The Malawi angel is blowing a cattle horn to announce the good news of the birth of the messiah. All the shepherds carry sticks, and one is holding a lamb on his shoulders. And the wise travelers from afar are riding a donkey, a camel, and an elephant, respectively.

Even though I had studied the social and material world of the Bible in seminary, where one of my teachers drove home the truth about Jesus’ racial heritage—You can’t hide a white baby in Egypt—it took children of color coming into my world—my first two grandsons, adopted from Ethiopia and Thailand—to prompt me to purchase African and Asian nativity sets. And because their parents are white I took some figures from my original white nativity and some from the black and brown nativities to make a complete tableau, sent one multicultural set to them, kept one multicultural set at home, and took one multicultural set to church.

Each year a nativity set from a different country is added to the cardboard house so we get a sense of Jesus’ ever-expanding birthplace: babies and parents, women and men, young and old, extended family arriving for the census and star-followers from the East, and a growing menagerie of livestock and their herders. All of which illustrate the fact that Mary and Joseph are staying in a relative’s home overflowing with Middle-eastern hospitality—not in a “cattle shed” behind an “inn,” neither of which are in the Bible although they continue to plague pageants and perpetuate the anti-Semitic notion that Jesus was rejected by his own at birth.

And to mix it up a bit, there’s a female-looking wise person from Java, and a set of light-skinned figures constructed from rolled-up magazine pages and made in Vietnam (www.serv.org). After all, Jesus came into the world for us whites, too.