This week I put up the creche I made with my mom when I was little.
This post is a kind of rerun, an edited version of a post about that creche that I shared a few years back before I had any idea it would be a chapter in a memoir I’ve almost finished about how I came to Christ.
Read it for the first time or again with a greater understanding of God’s patient sovereignty in our lives.
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After the first snowfall of second grade, there was a small, corrugated box, a pile of Popsicle sticks, a jar full of sawdust, some huge pinecones, and some bark on the kitchen table when I came home from school. My mom said we were going to make a crèche. My brother, Bruce, and I sat beside her as she set the box on its side and folded the upper flap to make a roof. She pulled apart the pinecone petals and showed me how to glue them on like shingles. She opened the sides, and the box turned into a building with wide open doors. She showed me how to glue Popsicle sticks on the doors and the inside of the box. Now it looked like Granddaddy’s barn. She spread some glue on the floor of the box, and Bruce got to sprinkle it with sawdust. We glued the tree bark on the outside walls.
After we washed our hands, my mom helped Bruce zip up his parka before she pulled on her maroon coat with the fur collar and cuffs. I climbed into the back seat of the black Ford station wagon next to Bruce while my mom reached into her purse and pulled out a shiny tube. Glancing in the mirror, she arched each lip with the color of a candy apple. Her purse snapped shut, and we were off to the ten-cent store.
In the center of the five and dime there was a high counter where a short little old lady sat behind a cash register while her little old man wandered the store. Bruce and I glided along the outside counters fingering the small bins of pink teddy bear erasers, Mickey Mouse pencil cases, blunt-tipped scissors, silver jacks, rubber balls, green dice, leather wallets branded with lariats and rearing horses, balloons, bubbles, balsa wood gliders, and Popeye Pez dispensers, things we could only hope Santa would leave in our stockings. My mom was standing by the plastic folded rain hats, miniature sewing kits, darning needles, and crochet hooks when the little old man said, “May I help you?”
“Yes.” She scanned the shelves above the bins lined with china figurines: German shepherds, angora kittens, and nursery rhyme characters. “Do you carry nativity figures?”
“Right this way.” The little old man led us towards more bins chocked with ten-cent men in beards and red bathrobes, ladies in blue bathrobes and matching head scarves, and babies stuck in cattle troughs like where Granddaddy feeds his white-faced, red bodied Herefords. There were all sorts of animals too. My mom said I could pick out a cow, a donkey, and even a camel with a fancy red saddle. She picked out two of the bearded men. One would be Joseph, the other a shepherd. A blue lady would be Mary. Bruce got to pick out three kings. The purple one carried a golden treasure chest, the green one a basket. The red king a wooden box.
When we got home the sawdust was dry, so I could put my animals in the little barn. My mom put Mary and Joseph in the barn, and I put baby Jesus in the trough between them. She told Bruce to put the shepherd and his sheep on one side of the barn and the kings on the other side along with their camel because they had come across a desert to worship him. She glued a crocheted angel to the roof of the crèche to sing to the shepherd while he watched his little flock and told us this is what Christmas was about. Yet we placed the crèche on the stereo where my dad played Bing Crosby’s White Christmas and hung up our stockings on the mantel.
The night before Christmas, we put out a plate of cookies for Santa and two carrots for his reindeer. Then lying on the carpet, the tinseled Christmas tree the only light in the dark living room, I dreamed up a plan. After mommy and daddy went to sleep, I would sneak out of my bed and hide beside the couch. From there, I was sure to witness Santa coming down the chimney to stuff our stockings.
In the morning, I realized I’d slept through my scheme, yet when I raced down the stairs, there was my stocking, the top bulging with a ballerina’s pink tutu. “Mommy, Daddy, Look! Santa knew just what I wanted.”
They tittered and sipped their Maxwell House coffee as I left the room and returned in the pink leotard and tulle skirt.
My dad set the arm of the record player on the Nutcracker, and I twirled with joy beside the crèche – waiting patiently on the stereo.
Waiting for me to figure out that my mom and dad ate Santa’s cookies, that Santa was a fraud, that shepherds were poor, dirty men nobody usually sang to, and having a baby in a barn was gross, desperate, and extraordinary.
Heart – plus