Nativity Scene

Every Christmas, I set up a nativity scene. (When I was a kid, we used to call it a creche, but nobody seems to know what that means anymore, so I have to use the far clunkier term nativity scene.) I set it up because my mother had an old one that she set up every year, and I inherited it, and when I lost it through a combination of stupidity, youth and a too rapid move, I was eaten up with guilt until I managed to acquire a reasonable facsimile of my own. The thing is, though, I'm not at all religious, which will, I know, not come as much of a shock to most of y'all. And what little religion I possess, when I possess it, which isn't always, tends far more along vaguely hippie Celtic Wiccan Buddhist Taoist Pagan Mushroom Cult Quaker Theosophist Subgenius Dr. Bronner's Soap Whacko lines. Lines that, in other words, don't tend so much towards the I Wub Bebby Jeebus aesthetic but more to the "let's go drink some wassail and have mad world regenerating sex on the sacred stones in the snow." While meditating, naturally. God is within, yo, all one soap: dilute! Dilute!

Yet I continue year after year with the nativity scene. I've always tried to make it sort of multi ethnic, what with the tiny Christmas tree in there and the nutcracker and Santa Claus. This year I scored with a bright pink tinsel mini tree, vividly lit up with pink bulbs, which goes so awesomely with Joseph and the Wise Men and the Drummer Boy and the Angel and the Camel and the Cow and the Sheep and the Bagpipe Player (don't ask. An ex-boyfriend with both musical ability and Scottish ancestry who felt, in the way of Leos, that he should be represented uh, everywhere.) Then there's Mary, naturally, the co-star, except for some bizarre reason she's wearing a red dress, which makes my art historian self get all tingly and dizzy and out of whack. It's good to have reality altered a little although I cannot figure out why anyone would put Mary in a red dress. I mean, we all know what a red dress means. Maybe it's the Magdalene, although if she was there at Jesus' birth apparently aged 20something than I am totally heading off to embrace my long lapsed quasi Catholicism for its sympathetic understanding of those intergenerational romances and then I am going to get me a hot young thing to keep the winter at bay.

I don't stop decorating with the Jesus freaks. I usually put a couple of Buddhas in as well and possibly Ganesh or whatever other gods I happen to have lying around - I just got a nifty little Set, actually - so that everyone's included. I also made sure that I got a properly scaled dog for my nativity scene - the Bible doesn't mention Jesus' dog, but there had better have been one: dogs are awesome at sitting around mangers guarding babies from possibly rabid camels and lambs. And dogs are, of course, god like - much more so than infants, no matter how exalted their parentage; I've had both and I know.

So there it is, in the dining room this year. I haven't added the other gods or the goat horns or the mistletoe yet, but I will, I will. I like it. Because it's a party, you know, this midwinter birth, this solstice thing - and the more the merrier.