Nativity scenes
This is my grandmother’s nativity scene, which my mother gave me last christmas:
I like having it up because that grandmother was very significant to me (not entirely benign, but very important and her life shaped the person I am now in several ways) and it reminds me of her. She got married in 1936 and really wanted a nativity scene as part of her ‘setting up house’ but a combination of poverty, then the war and then austerity meant that she didn’t get one until the 1950s. This one was a ‘make it yourself’ one from a magazine. She cut out the pictures and my grandfather, who was a bit of an amateur painter and built boats for a living, painted on the colours and stuck on some scrap bits of wood from the boat-shop as the supports. I like that history of long desired and then made yourself and treasured.
But in other ways, it feels quite weird to have it up. It’s an overtly christian thing and I don’t have anything else like that up as christmas decorations. Actually, that’s not quite true, there’s a card of a Georges de la Tour painting I always put up:
It’s traditionally interpreted as Mary, Jesus and possibly St Anne, but one of the things I like about G de la T is that you can’t really tell whether they’re biblical or real life scenes and I like to read it as simply two women and a newborn baby. But then, I only put it up at christmas so I guess I’m inscribing it with my own allusions to christianity by doing so.
And my grandmother’s nativity scene is ridiculously sanitised and eurocentric and that’s never a newborn baby (unlike the G de la T one). And even when I was a christian I was right up the liberal/radical end and didn’t believe in the christmas story as anything other than a helpful myth after the age of about 12.
But something about nativity scenes and the newborn baby at the centre of the christmas story still speaks to me. Several christmasses were significant in my own chequered reproductive history and many were painful precisely because of this central baby. And christmas eve in particular makes me think about birth and expectant waiting and the long slog of labour (particularly so in my case!) and long-awaited joy finally arriving.
I like having it up because that grandmother was very significant to me (not entirely benign, but very important and her life shaped the person I am now in several ways) and it reminds me of her. She got married in 1936 and really wanted a nativity scene as part of her ‘setting up house’ but a combination of poverty, then the war and then austerity meant that she didn’t get one until the 1950s. This one was a ‘make it yourself’ one from a magazine. She cut out the pictures and my grandfather, who was a bit of an amateur painter and built boats for a living, painted on the colours and stuck on some scrap bits of wood from the boat-shop as the supports. I like that history of long desired and then made yourself and treasured.
But in other ways, it feels quite weird to have it up. It’s an overtly christian thing and I don’t have anything else like that up as christmas decorations. Actually, that’s not quite true, there’s a card of a Georges de la Tour painting I always put up:
It’s traditionally interpreted as Mary, Jesus and possibly St Anne, but one of the things I like about G de la T is that you can’t really tell whether they’re biblical or real life scenes and I like to read it as simply two women and a newborn baby. But then, I only put it up at christmas so I guess I’m inscribing it with my own allusions to christianity by doing so.
And my grandmother’s nativity scene is ridiculously sanitised and eurocentric and that’s never a newborn baby (unlike the G de la T one). And even when I was a christian I was right up the liberal/radical end and didn’t believe in the christmas story as anything other than a helpful myth after the age of about 12.
But something about nativity scenes and the newborn baby at the centre of the christmas story still speaks to me. Several christmasses were significant in my own chequered reproductive history and many were painful precisely because of this central baby. And christmas eve in particular makes me think about birth and expectant waiting and the long slog of labour (particularly so in my case!) and long-awaited joy finally arriving.