When I was a kid Christmas was nothing more than a festival of overindulgence. I think my parents were feeling a bit guilty about having a business that was open 363 days a year; Christmas and New Year being to odd ones out. There was no reference whatsoever in my family of anything religious or sacred being attached to Christmas.
So, I found it just a little odd that in the front room (we had a front room in our house where there was a bunch of wooden crates filled with all sorts of interesting stuff from books to tools to autograph books, to silver tea pots; the list goes on. The front room was always dark and no one ever went in there, except when I snuck in during some of those 363 busy days on my family’s life) I found a nativity scene, a little wooden stable with carved wooden figures of Mary and Joseph with Jesus and a few farm animals. It was about 100mm wide (although it those days I would have said 4 inches) and almost as high. It smelt of camphor and dust. It never came out in polite company, but at Christmas time, once I had found it, I would sneak in and hold it gently and look at it curiously. Then we moved. The boxes were lost or broken, their contents scattered across a number of houses and sheds over the next 6 or 7 years of my life.
Somehow this nativity scene remained in my possession. I am not really sure how that happened. Years passed on now with a wife and kids of our own we carried on in the traditional overindulgent spirit of Christmas.
It was when we moved into what we thought were fairly temporary digs, our kids were maybe 4 and 5 at the time that the little camphor-wood nativity scene made its first real and memorable appearance in our family. The tree was up and the decorations were hung and the little stable was on the floor beneath the tree, almost as obscure as another scene on the first Christmas. It was Jake who spotted it. “Look, a Christmas House!” he cried.
I thought to myself that I could never have felt comfortable even mentioning that I knew of its existence to my parents, not a 5 and not at 35. I was glad that my kids had been brought up with far more freedom that I could have ever imagined.
Call me sentimental old coot, but we still have that Christmas House and it still means a lot to me; a thing of curiosity, a smell that is embedded in my entire central nervous system, a hint of something that could not be spoken about but that also could not be forgotten, a symbol of spiritual and relational freedom.
This year we will be away from hoe over Christmas. While I won’t be getting the decorations out that one small Christmas House will travel with me in thought. No one else will know. No one else would probably care. But it will travel in my heart and mind. I am sure I will even be able to smell it.
The words of a very minor prophet 