Looking for Jesus

The only two items of holiday paraphernalia in my home that have anything other than decorative significance are an angel for my tree, and a tiny, three-piece Nativity scene.

The angel was made for me by my great Aunt Harriette for one of my first Christmases. I mist up every time I get it out, remembering her bent little arthritic fingers, and imagining how much it must have hurt her to sew the wee beads onto the felt dress, wings, and halo with such patience and precision. I don’t know exactly where Jesus came from, though. My kids call him “Little Peg Jesus,” since he is quite literally (I suppose due to the primitive rendering of his swaddling clothes) a wooden peg with a little gold wire halo. He’s adorable. Not kidding. Best of all, he is glued into a diminutive manger, less than an inch high and lined with real straw. By now, there’s actually very little straw extant from my childhood, as it has been packed and unpacked annually for over 40 years. But the effect is the same.

Mary and Joseph are wooden cones with spheres glued to the tips, also sporting wire halos. Unlike their offspring, they are not cute.

Joseph has two little stumps sticking out from his cone-robe, making him look as though someone has amputated his arms above the elbows. From one of them used to dangle a little acorn-shaped lantern, but the string that attached it broke a couple of years ago. Against all odds, the lantern, no larger than a chickpea, has spent the last several off-seasons in the junk drawer. It has now become part of tradition for the kids to rifle through batteries, screwdrivers, chargers, rubber bands, tea lights and various other detritus to triumphantly emerge with this tiny bauble, the finishing touch to the Nativity scene. Joseph’s other stump clutches (or, more accurately, is impaled by) a shepherd’s crook.

But poor, poor Mary. Like her hapless husband’s, her gown is a cone, but no arms has she. Affixed to her front is a small spike, meant, I can only surmise, to be hands clasped in prayer. Like all good Madonnas, she is sporting a wimple (is that what it’s called?) and her little wooden head is bowed in prayer. She’d be quite lovely were it not for her fused, mutant extremities.

Oh! Did I mention that they do not have faces? It’s true. Like the people in that creepy episode of Star Trek, they are completely featureless. They do, however, have painted on gilt hair. Truly, the holy parents are a bit of a freak show.

The final piece to this miniature scene is the obligatory bit of plastic pine garland on which the figures are arranged. When my Mom handed the crèche down to me, it was in a box with this bit of plastic, and for whatever reason, I can’t bear to part with it. Each year, when Christmas is past, I consider throwing it away; but instead, I put it back in the little round box it has lived in for all of these years.

When the girls were little, my mother sent them a Playmobil Nativity set. It was the cutest damned thing ever, and gave our little primitive family a run for their money. They were about the same size, but this set included wise guys, a camel, and frankincense. Pretty stiff competition. Also, the girls called it the Jesus Game. Why not? It came in a box about the size of a game board’s, it had lots of pieces, and there was actually a little cardboard set, not unlike a game board, on which to stage the scene. Although I was pretty enamored of the Jesus Game myself, I knew that with its flashy colors and conspicuous cuteness, it wasn’t the Real Thing. Sure enough, the kids outgrew it in a few years.

But not the mutant Jesus family. The peg people and their truncated limbs remain very much a part of our Christmas tradition.

So a few Decembers ago, when I grudgingly decided it was time to start digging out the stuff to deck the halls for Christmas, I came across this little round box. When I opened it, it was empty. Jesus and family were AWOL for the first time in forty years.

Come to think of it, it was a little like Mary Magdalene when the stone rolls aside and the tomb is empty. Except in this case, it was the whole family, and they were, of course, little wooden figurines as opposed to the actual son of god, virgin mother, and poor hapless shepherd who doesn’t know how he wound up in such a pickle.

Anyway, I was puzzled. All of the Christmas stuff is packed away in the same two boxes every year, in the same storage room in the basement, so I went through everything a second time, thinking perhaps I had stowed him with the ornaments. Not there. I looked in the box with all of the lights and extension cords: no luck. He was nowhere to be found. By this time, I was tired, the house was only half decorated, and I was good and sick of the whole enterprise. I called off the search, sent the kids to bed, and poured a glass of wine.

But the next day, I kept thinking about it as I was doing other things. Where could Baby Jesus be? And more importantly, why did I care?

Despite the presence of the tiny crèche in my parents’ home, I was pretty much raised a heathen, so my concern wasn’t some sort of religious hangover from childhood. I think it had more to do with a Christmas almost 20 years ago. We had just moved to the middle of nowhere, to a town that made Dayton, Ohio look cosmopolitan. Out of a combination of desperation for human contact and homesickness, we went to church during Advent. It was an evening service at a lovely old Episcopal church: old wood and candle light. Much to my surprise, when the priest read the nativity story from the gospel of Luke, I started to cry. (This was the same Christmas I had to do all of my shopping at Wal*Mart, so I was in a fragile state.) Here were these young parents, scared and homeless, in a strange place due to circumstances beyond their control, and then came this baby that might just save the world. In a very personal way, the whole thing made sense.

To me, the Bible is just a book. It’s not the word of god or a sacred text, but like every story, it’s full of people and their struggles and their tragedies. Jesus was just a baby. I don’t know if he was the Messiah or the son of god, but like every baby, his birth had the power to redeem and change the world. This was the only time I’ve had anything like a religious experience in a traditionally religious setting. I was a newish parent, and my 15 month-old daughter was really the only thing in our lives that was going just right. And that was enough. Even the worst days had bright spots (my favorite was the day she said “button!” for the first time — how did she know that word?). She gave our lives a center and a rhythm. She took us out of ourselves. She saved us. As I listened to the priest, this huge sense of peace washed over me. Christmas was about a baby. That was all. And that was everything.

I haven’t really thought about that time in some years, nor have I been to church much since. Christmases have been happy; we’ve been at home with family around us. I spend the season vacillating between fuzzy, nostalgia-filled, genuine holiday spirit, and cynical eye-rolling at the suburban craziness that ramps up this time of year: elaborate handmade Christmas cards, cookie exchanges, mall shopping, and assemblies where the parents need to be instructed to watch other people’s kids as well as their own. But that year, when I lost the baby Jesus, it got me thinking again.

Suddenly, while going about my other business and passively stewing over the missing peg baby, I remembered a place I hadn’t looked. The minute I got home, I went straight to the basement, and there, in a box inside a box, was the little mutant family wrapped snuggly in tissue paper.

“I found Jesus!!” I yelled to the kids.

Lily ran to the junk drawer and fished out the lantern. Ellen started in on how weird and stumpy and faceless the figures were. We admired Little Peg Jesus and how cute he was. Jesus was found, and Christmas was on.