Seven swans a-swimming

Happy 7th day of Christmas! You'll notice some exquisite cholla lace from Borrego has joined our Nativity scene, but the Magi are still days away.

In a manger

Wishing you a blessed Christmas, shepherds before kings!

Venite

Christmas

This year's take on the nativity (which you've followed over the years) is nestled among shells found over the years along the beach. Does it look a little like the detritus left by a high tide? It's inspired in part by the nativity in rubble in the Lutheran Church in Bethlehem.

Feliz navidad

It all came together again! Succulents amplified with sequoia cones.

Listen!

Reunited in California with the familiar Mexican nativity after a year's hiatus, but still enjoying our church community in New York. In her sermon at the Chrismas Vigil (streamed), our rector recalled the late Stephen Sondheim's argument against the use of amplification in theaters: it makes the theatergoer a mere passive visitor, instead of a participant, leaning forward to make out the words. In this year's array even the angels seem to be leaning forward, even the star. 

Westward leading, still proceeding

 

The Del Mar Mexican nativity group is in good hands! And don't think it's late to be posting a picture of it: the Magi are still en route. They don't arrive with their gold, frankincense and myrrh until Wednesday.

Adeste fidelis

How I miss these folks! What's become an important Christmas tradition for me is setting up this simple Mexican nativity group in different ways each year in a nook in our house in California - with various things creatively scavenged. Remember the 2010 lights, the 2012 bubble wrap, the 2016 shells, the 2018 shadows, last year's macadamia nuts? 2013's (above) incorporated Torrey Pine seeds and flowers from my mother' garden. There's been one every year though I didn't show all here, like 2011's with lemons from my father's tree! And the year when styrofoam blocks and impending war inspired 3 scenes predates this blog by a few years.

Christmas in California wasn't in the cards for us this year, alas, but sorting through these photos is almost as good as setting it up anew! Hope the spirit of Christmas finds a way into all our worlds in 2021 too.

Behold

"In scandal, find reconciliation," a sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent I watched yesterday, opened my eyes anew to just how "scandalous" the Christmas story is. The Rev. Winnie Varghese, whom I heard at St Mark's in the Bowery and is now at Trinity Wall Street, was preaching on the apparently thankless first chapter of Matthew, a forty-two generation genealogy of Jesus (well, of Joseph) and the start of the nativity narrative. Yet if we were familiar with the names in the genealogy, she suggested, it would tell you all you need to know about the kind of story Matthew was beginning. This isn't Mary's family yet, but the genealogy, surprisingly, includes the names of four women in its cascade of male begettings: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and "the wife of Uriah." If you know what they underwent - perhaps Mary did - you know this will not be an easy story.

For his part Joseph, son of Jacob, isn't the first Joseph, son of Jacob in the family, and like his forebear (an uncle many generations before), he's a dreamer. In Matthew, Rev. Varghese recounted, Joseph sees four dreams, follows them, then disappears from the story. He never speaks. Mary doesn't either. The powerful - the Magi, the Governor - speak, but Mary and Joseph listen, and see. There's a lesson already in this. And what does Joseph see? His first dream comes in Matthew 1, as he's instructed not to cast away his unaccountably pregnant young fiancé, as righteousness would require, but rather to care for her and her child. A scandalous response to a scandal, upending a scandal-filled family history - but this, Rev. Varghese reminded us, is what the justice of God looks like. Wow... It's like hearing the story for the first time.

There are no shepherds in Matthew's telling. They come in Luke, society's lowliest the first to be told of the birth of the savior... and the only audience for a performance by the hosts of heaven! He's born in a manger, surrounded by beasts of burden? Scandalous! Venite adoremus!

Venite adoremus

Nativity 2018

Happy Christmas!

Venite adoremus

This year's Del Mar nativity (you've seen the set before), among surf-tossed shell survivors retrieved over the years along Torrey Pines beach - one a delicate sand dollar.

Venite adoremus

Christmas greetings from our little Mexican nativity set, this time with flowers and plants from the garden, and lots of seeds of local Torrey Pine trees... and a brace of turtledoves!

Venite adoremus

This year's nativity scene features self-transcending bubblewrap and an African angel (and ancestors), with Torrey Pine needles and seeds.

Merry Christmas

This year's nativity scene.