There's a party in our manger

One of my favorite wedding gifts was a nativity scene that includes many more characters than the standard family, kings, shepherd, animals and angel. It has been a lovely part of each Christmas since but it became much more once Lil E fell in love with it too.

I get it. It has little people and this mysterious baby he's always been enamored with and doted upon in the little bed of porcelain straw.

This year, though, Lil E is curious about each person and creature standing around the Baby Jesus.

"OH! THE JESUS SCENE!" he squealed when I pulled it from the plastic trunk full of Christmas decorations. Then a moment of pondering in his heart and overworked mind. "What is this thing again?"

And so I began to briefly and solemnly tell the story of the Baby Jesus's birth and the angel descending and the trek of the kings and...was promptly interrupted by another squeal to find not only the Baby Jesus but also another baby that belongs to a mother who delightfully stands by Mary with her own children in our nativity.

He lost all interest in ornaments, making the sheep bleat and even the "hooooola hooop" line from the Alvin and the Chipmunks song he'd been repeating for almost an hour. Within minutes, he'd already begged me to let him take the babies -- the non-savior one now dubbed for some bizarre reason "Backpacker" and the savior causing much concern over whether his cloth-rendered diaper needed to be changed -- to school for Friday show and tell, had put them into and pulled them out of his cargo pants pockets a dozen times and had launched them across the room and into the tree from the "naughty angel" ornament he found.

In that time, I'd finished decorating the tree, had Dust Busted needles from the living room three times, shattered one glass bulb and had yelled out a phrase I never in a million years A.D. thought would spring forth from my maternal mouth: "LIL E DO NOT SLINGSHOT THE BABY JESUS!"

We are progressive Christians, I swear to that poor cloth-diapered cannonball of a child of God, and somehow propelling the miniature redeemer into an evergreen full of glass and light and suspiciously quick-shedding needles just did not seem right.

But not to worry. Baby Jesus was sweetly returned to his "little crib thingy" and Backpacker was suspended in a surprisingly secure manner from the nail where the angel usually hovers over all the witness to the natal miracle.

The angel didn't need to be on high, though, Apparently, while the babes were sleeping amongst the creatures great and small, the rest of attendants to Christ were whooping it up in the eastern corner of the stall.

I didn't notice until after Lil E went to bed, but I've taken note every night since then that there is a new arrangement daily of everyone from king to lowly shepherd to unexpected mother (this time without those kids) crowded in and seeming to be happy, celebratory and in fact, missing only a keg and possibly a Papa John's pizza.

No matter how it really happened those thousands of years ago, I am loving the preschooler's interpretation of Christmas in the front window of our house this week. And no matter who is hanging with the holiest of families, in ours, it's not just an event, not just a party. It's a real scene.

Comments

[furiousball]

you know, you just add a strobe and then put a doll behind the wheels of steel and it looks like an E-soaked rave in the manger

[Anne P]

"Do not slingshot the baby jesus" is one of the funniest things I have ever read. Thank you!

[Mat]

That looks just like the one we had when I was a boy. And I did the same thing... arranging all the characters and all. That brings back some good memories. I never did slingshot the baby Jesus though. I bet he can go super fast!