The “Baby Jesus people”: that’s the name our kids had for the nativity set when they were small, especially the Playmobil version with more “play value.” (The image below isn’t our actual set; ours came with a cardboard “stable” but had extra pieces in the form of three wise men and a camel, and it really did get played with.)
They’ve grown past that now, but this year, wanted a stable for the front yard, and my husband, always up for an excuse to get out his hammer and power tools, built this:
Yes, it’s huge. Or, in 2015 terminology, it’s yuuuge! I’m not quite sure how easily we’ll be able to store this after the Christmas season is over (whether we define it as ending after Epiphany or the Baptism of Jesus or Candlemas). But, just like I need a sewing project every now and again, he needs a woodworking project.
It also seems to me that some sort of outdoor nativity set is becoming more common around here, though usually purchased from the local home improvement store. And it seems to me that the whole debate about nativity displays at city halls, which has died down, so far as I can tell, into a sort of status quo, has perhaps become less relevant as more people create displays in their front yards. Of course, if you’re in a suburb where all homes are in their own tucked-away subdivisions, or in a city where there is no front yard to speak of, this doesn’t work. And the same’s true of churches, too — if the “front yard” of a church is nothing but a parking lot, perhaps separated from the street by some landscaping berms, then a nativity set means little except to those headed inside.
Around us, there’s a park where the park district has a “holiday lights display”: a tree, a gingerbread house, a train, etc. Up until a couple years ago, there was never a nativity set, and it didn’t seem to trouble anyone, since directly across the street is a church, which had always had its own display. But: then a group dedicated to the goal of having nativity displays in public places made the request, and the city accommodated them, with a marked-off corner, which now contains, in one corner, a plastic nativity display, in two further corners, displays by the humanists and the atheists (who at least toned down their message from two years ago), and the fourth corner seems to be waiting for a menorah. Personally, I liked it better when the church displayed the nativity set instead.
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