The Fish Net
Boston Presbyterian Church
Christmas 2011
Dear Friends,
	Recently a Christmas catalogue came in the mail from a Christian bookstore.  While browsing through it I came across a Veggie Tales nativity set.  The Veggie Tales are a well known resource for teaching young children about the Bible and so, perhaps it only makes sense to have a Veggie Tales nativity set.  Even so I found it a bit disconcerting.  
	To a degree every age and culture portrays the first Christmas in its own image.  Take our traditional nativity sets and pictures for example.  Most of them originate from medieval Europe and so depict Jesus, Mary and Joseph as being fair skinned, Jesus lying in a wooden feeding trough and the stable itself being a wooden structure.  The historians however tell us that the reality was probably quite different.  For starters, being Semitic and living in the Middle East, the Holy Family’s skin colour was certainly darker than usually portrayed.  In addition, unlike in medieval Europe, wood was scarce and so only used when necessary.  The manger then was almost certainly made of stone and the stable was a cave, natural or more likely man made, dug into a hillside.  This is not the way most of usually envision that first Christmas!
	It is natural and even helpful for us to imagine the first Christmas in ways we can relate to but to return to the Veggie Tales nativity set, where do we draw the line?  To use another example, I think of one scene I saw on TV recently where the Holy Family, shepherds and wise men were depicted as moose!  It was very cute but at what point do we so sentimentalize the birth of Jesus and make it so cutsy that we trivialize it and lose sight of its meaning?  At what point do our nativity scenes cease to be helpful and become a barrier to our grasping the mind-boggling significance and promise of Christmas; “that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth”?
	Wishing you a most blessed Christmas!
Shawn