Away Goes a Manger

I hold a significant amount of fondness for Audrey's nativity set, which is a bit surprising to me. It's a highly traditional, old-fashioned, Euro-centric depiction of the birth of Christ that doesn't have an ounce of verve to it, and yet, I love to see it come out at Christmas. 

With my Mum passing a year ago this Wednesday, we had pretty limited decorations last December and so the nativity set never made it out. This year, it is within sight of my computer desk, nestled beneath a tree decorated by nothing but stars and angels.

Thinking about it, there are three reasons that this particular set appeals to me so much.

Gratitude - the set itself was a gift from Audrey's parents, but Opa went a step further and built a stable for it out of scrap wood. He even added a light so the interior is more visible. He's busy building another stable for a different set of Fenya's right now as well.

Attitude - my wife and I have a real problem with so many characters from the Bible being depicted as white people in art. In particular, the idea of Jesus, a man native to first-century Palestine, looking like a community college student from Nebraska in 1953 is just galling to us. Audrey's mother was understanding about this, despite coming from a generation where this was obviously no big deal, and was willing to repaint all the skin tones and make them just a bit earthier and more appropriate to the setting.

Fortitude - You wouldn't know it to look at it, but this little nativity set has seen some stuff, man. It was sitting in a box on Audrey's Mum's work desk in the basement in their lovely home on an acreage in High River.

In 2013.

The year of the High River flood, that is.

On June 21, a wet slurry of river mud and water built pressure up against the double doors leading out of the basement until they finally gave way, flooding the basement to the four-foot mark before receding by about a foot and a half. The force of its entry threw a full-size treadmill all the way across the basement and turned it upside down.

Oma assumed the nativity set had been washed away, but when they returned home, it turned out the floodwaters had somehow lifted the cardboard box off the desk, carried it outdoors and set it on the picnic table on the basement patio. The cardboard box was a write-off, but there was not a scratch on the figures inside.

My belief system doesn't contain a God so vain that he couldn't bear to have images of his relatives desecrated by a flood, so I am not going to say this was a miracle or the result of divine interaction or anything like that.

But despite all that, it doesn't seem too out of place to call it miraculous either, and it makes me smile to recall it almost every time I look at the Nativity set.