Sandy Curnow Reflection

Nativity and the Christmas Crib

Mary and Joseph register as part of the Census of Quirinius, Chora Church, Istanbul (Wikimedia.org: public domain image)

Most scholars agree that the Census Luke’s Gospel refers to is wrongly dated, and that no Augustan census ever required people to travel back to their places of origin. However, the idea of that exercise of Roman authority catching up with a pregnant girl and her carpenter husband sticks in our imaginations, which is partly why the lovely mosaic above resonates so vividly. The image is of Mary in matronly black and Joseph a step behind her having their names registered on a long Davidic list in Bethlehem. In the mosaics of the Chora Church (cir. 1300), just outside the old city walls in Istanbul, the Governor Quirinius sits on a golden throne wearing a red military cloak while an armed guard stands close behind him. This Bethlehem is a foreign occupied town. In the centre are the tools of taxation and administration; the record keeper with his massive lists and sharp pen has a soldier with drawn sword to protect him, he’s no popular figure. To the right Mary stands alone and crowded behind her a line of Joseph and his (apocryphal) adult sons cluster with some apprehension. One side of the scene is a display of sheer power, the other is fear and vulnerability.

Images of the Nativity are earlier than the mosaic, but not as early as you might think. One of the first churches built to celebrate the Virgin Mary, the great Roman basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, was erected only after the Council of Ephesus of 431, which proclaimed Mary as Mother of God. That’s the crucial bit. If Christ is both God and man then his mother and his birth, both, take on new dimensions. Bethlehem is about God.

Holy Cradle by Antoine Taveneaux (Wikimedia.org public domain image)

To make the point, a number of pieces of sycamore, reputedly from the manger, were encased in this rather (too) splendid gold and rock crystal reliquary for the lower chapel of the church – the Bethlehem Crypt directly below the high altar. (As an aside, not far from the recent tomb of Pope Francis.) Earliest images of the nativity are rather simpler; often enough a swaddled baby with the heads of an ox and an ass peering rather idiotically over the manger’s edge. Growing up partly in the country, I’ve always enjoyed the thought of their warm breaths over a midwinter babe. To put the animals into theological perspective, the reference for the two is at the beginning of Isaiah: “The ox knows its owner, and the ass its master’s crib,” and continues: “but Israel has not known me, and my people have not understood”. The ox and the ass are supposed to refer to the clean and unclean – to the Jewish people and to gentiles.

Saint Francis set up a living nativity in Greccio near Assisi in 1223 (so only a little earlier than the Chora mosaic); it was simply an ox and an ass – borrowed presumably from a co-operative farmer – and hay in a feed trough. The people found it startlingly moving. In later artistic images the virgin was added, and only gradually thereafter the other figures to our scene.

The Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel by Duccio di Buoninsegna. Altarpiece in Siena Cathedral, dated 1308

Recently it struck me that everyone in today’s nativity scenes, apart from the ox and ass, actually travelled there. Nobody but the ox and ass belonged. 

Travelling today, the distance between Nazareth and Bethlehem is about 150 km on a road that runs down the west of Israel near the coast. In the time of Mary and Joseph a safer route, perhaps the same distance, would have gone east round the Jordan valley avoiding Samaria. Five days travelling first light to dusk on, traditionally, a donkey and at walking pace, would be the footsore minimum. These are difficulties that the author of St Luke’s Gospel would have recognised. And while he may well have known that King David, from whose descendants the Messiah was to be born, was a shepherd in his youth, and may well have seen Christ as the Good Shepherd “I know mine and mine know me”, he probably didn’t realise that shepherds were held to be a light-fingered lot, cheerfully collecting any wandering sheep or goat into their own flocks. They were not reliable witnesses nor particularly welcome guests, yet they are chosen as witnesses to the birth of Christ. And even they had to travel from the hills. Finally the wise men from the east – no one knows how many they were or where from – were from the beginning understood as distant travellers. 

The angels of course came from elsewhere, but presumably found travelling easy.

They are a varied lot of travellers who gather round today’s crib. But that has become the point of Christmas today. People come together to celebrate Christ’s birth; not simply in the church for Midnight Mass, or for prayer, but to be together to celebrate, as we always do with food and drink, the advent of a new child. Christmas draws the unlikely crew that is family – often distant – together in the home. In this sense it is truly the descendant of Jewish festivals which are so frequently centred around the family dining table rather than the Synagogue.  

Our family celebrated Christmas in that same way. When I was a child, we would set out as early in December as we could manage, with the old Ford loaded with cases and packages and gifts and city extras even to the running boards, and head up the Hume Highway to my grandparents place on the Southern Tablelands. At that time it was a full day’s travel of 12 hours or more. Other family came from distant places – in many ways we were as motley a lot as in Bethlehem.  

The sprawling homestead was a world unto itself. Originally with its own post office, it was a maze of buildings and outbuildings. There was the convict built old house of rammed pisé with the ‘new’ house built in bricks made on the place added in front, a quarter of a century before. There were outhouses and dugouts and batchelors and staff quarters; saddlerooms and stables, meat shed, cowsheds and a dairy where the sweet smell of milk had seeped into a 100 years of old cool flagstones. The separator (sterilised daily) had over 50 separate pieces, but now they had ‘the electric’ it was no longer turned by hand. Woodfired coppers in the laundry kept all the linen white, but Monday washdays were brutally hot in summer. There was a huge chook-yard with poultry of all shapes and sizes: gathering eggs each morning was itself an adventure, a broody hen could leave small hands bleeding and an angry drake could, as one stationhand put it “give you a lift”. You got out of the way of rams, and bulls and snakes and someone else’s cattle dogs. Grandad’s dog Ginger considered grandchildren part of one of her litters – she just couldn’t remember which one. She wasn’t above giving you a nip if you got out of line. You learnt the hard way, tumbling off ponies, always to get straight back on, that was the rule. It was a wholly absorbing world filled with past lives and unwritten country knowledge as well as present activity.   

Out there were the sheep and cattle and the yards and the shearing shed – the reason our forebearers had settled in this place. And the fires we fought and the droughts they endured and the rabbit plagues that denuded whole hillsides.

Different as we were in our generations, this was the homestead where almost all our parents married and our grandparents lived – bone of our bone. 

Gram started Christmas early, and as usual on a massive scale. Her recipe book for Christmas puddings has quantities for 15 cloth covered bundles of fruit and nuts, all finished off with bottles of brandy; her storeroom was vast. Puddings could never fit on a stove top, they were boiled in an old copper outside on a day of low fire risk and dried hanging from a line – with a barrier to secure them from possums. Choosing the turkey was serious business. Gram went – well really she processed with a train of grandchildren – down to the fowl yard. After due inspection, she would point her walking stick at one of the birds and it fell to my brother (the eldest grandson) to grab it and do the killing. Now, one huge turkey gobbler looks very much the same as another and 18 kgs of angry bird had a deal of momentum, but he usually managed to get the right one. The deed done, the bird plucked and prepared, it was just a question of fitting it in the oven.  While Cook ruled the kitchen Gram supervised the Christmas bird. It would go into the oven sometime late after dinner on Christmas Eve, we would go off to Midnight Mass with the family and  it would come out when we got home around 3.00 am. Left covered on the kitchen bench, it was almost room temperature for Christmas lunch. Just time enough to make the gravy. 

Getting to Midnight Mass was a hilarious adventure for us small kids, but we knew it tested family bonds to the limit and muffled our giggles. Uncles and uncles-in-law argued, we always got lost. Canberra was the only church within travelling distance where a priest could manage Midnight Mass, and Canberra in the very early Burley Griffin days was a series of diabolical circuits in blank paddocks. In wartime there were neither road-names nor street lights. St Christopher’s was much smaller then and brand new. Under Gram’s steely eye, most of the men and all of the women and children trooped in mostly in time for the Epistle. When we made it home – with dimmed headlights of course along miles of rough roads – by mutual consent the men made it to the whisky decanter and women packed sleeping children into bed and filled Christmas stockings.

The turkey needed to be big, there were nearly 20 of us lodged in bedrooms and corners around the house, in cots and camp-beds as well. When the dining table had all its extensions in we could cram ourselves round it, which we did for this day. Almost as diverse a lot as round the crib.

But no-one could match Mum’s crib. I slept in the room my parents had – called the Dormitory because of its size (all the rooms had names) – which was at the end of the old convict part of the house. Mum had set up a crib on a little table there against the old chimney piece. Because in wartime proper candles were unavailable, she had saved the coloured ones from past birthday cakes and washed them. But the scent of past cake clings, and where you have sheep you have flies. 

Our crib had a visitor which made it unique. Instead of the farm animals of Israel, or a spangle of angels, we had, hiding behind St Joseph and with Mum’s total approval, the biggest black huntsman spider you have ever seen. The flies flocked to the candles set up round the infant in the crib, and if you think we ate well in the dining room, the spider had the best dinner that went on for weeks. All his Christmases came at once. 

We were sure the infant in the straw had a smile on His face.

By Sandy Curnow