!Christ
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agk's diary
27 December 2024 @ 03:39 UTC
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written on Pinebook Pro
in the living room after daughter sleeps
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First daughter's animals all and sundry waited
around the stable or cave where Miriam labored and
Yusuf boiled water. The angels arrived, the child,
the shepherds. The three Persians aren't here yet.
I, said the cow all white and red,
I gave Him my manger for His bed.
I gave Him my hay to pillow His head;
I, said the cow, all white and red.
My three favorite Christmas picture books feature
the beasts.
Noel du Petit Lapin by Eleonore Schmid, 2000
(Hare's Christmas Gift). A hare nervously watches
as butterflies and snakes, foxes and elk are oddly
all awake at dusk. The beasts rush with sticks,
grass, and feathers to a stone stable. A tired man
and woman arrive. The man makes a fire under a
heavy pot. Beasts' eyes shine as each in turn looks
in the stable. The hare gathers courage, sees the
infant asleep on the bed of grass and feathers,
joins him in the manger to warm him. The infant
smiles. Schmid drew the infant very like she did in
her beautiful 1990 book The Story of Christmas from
the Gospel According to Luke.
The ox and donkey, so they say,
did keep His holy presence warm....
How many oxen and donkeys you know
at such a time would do the same?
How Little Porcupine Played Christmas by Joseph
Slate, illustrated by Felicia Bond (who also drew
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie), 1982.
Little porcupine so wants a part in the baby in the
manger play. The animals in his barn school merci-
lessly bully him and deny him a role. His mama
gives him big prickly hugs; calls him the light of
her life. He's stage crew and janitor on opening
night when the audience of mamas and papas notice
there's no star. He clambers up the tree, covered
in tinsel. He was already the star of his mama's
life, but now he's the star itself, holy light,
last suddenly become first. My mom read this to me
every Christmas season.
Enough for Him, whom cherubim
worship night and day.
A breastful of milk
and a mangerful of hay;
enough for him whom angels
fall down before
the ox and ass and camel
which adore.
Christina's Carol by Christina Georgina Rosetti,
illustrated by Tomie DePaola, 2021.
(We also love DePaola's 1978 The Clown of God, a
story of Christmas devotion in Renaissance Italy.)
Tomie died in 2020 before he finished illustrating
Christina's 1872 poem. His estate supplied angels
and shepherds, Madonnas, nativities, and magi to
finish the book. From Rosetti's snowy land we
travel to first-century Palestine where Imran and
Hannah, Miriam, Alishaba and Zakariyya lived, where
Yahya and Isa were born. Paintings and dioramas
include three wildly different Madonna and childs
on one page. Stylistic cacophony caused by mid-
project death hints incarnation will always escape
representation.
Shepherds, too, came carrying
the good things of the flock: sweet milk,
fresh meat, fitting praise.... A fitting sight
that to the Lamb a lamb should be offered.
The lamb bleated...thanks to the Lamb
who freed sheep and oxen
from sacrifices.
My daughter's creche recalls the first, Francis of
Assisi's. Twenty years of crop failures, earth-
quakes, Crusader war, and pestilence followed Salah
ad-Din's death. For a few days of the four-week
ceasefire of 1219, Francis met Sultan (and Salah
ad-Din's nephew) al-Kamil. In 1220 Francis and his
companion sailed back to Italy. It was Francis's
only trip to Palestine. At Christmas 1223 he
brought the nativity to vivid life in the mouth of
a small Italian cave, wrote Bonaventure (c.1260):
Three years before his death...he celebrate[d] the
memory of the Birth of the Child Jesus, with all
the solemnity that he might, for the kindling of
devotion. That this might not seem an innovation,
he sought and obtained license from the Supreme
Pontiff, and then made ready a manger, and bade
hay, together with an ox and an ass, be brought
unto the spot.
The Brethren were called together, the folk assem-
bled, the wood echoed with their voices, and that
august night was made radiant and solemn with many
bright lights, and with tuneful and sonorous
praises.... Solemn Masses were celebrated over the
manger, Francis...chanting the Holy Gospel. Then
he preached unto the folk standing around of the
Birth of the King in poverty.
Yusuf grew up 4 km from Miriam's parents. The
occupier ordered them to leave their city, go be
counted where Yusuf's distant ancestors came from.
They walked 150 km in a week and a half through
cold rain.
First daughter's animals welcome tired strangers
far from home stinking of sweet breast milk, sour
sweat, earthy mildew. Beasts await and celebrate
Isa's birth in the cave where they're stabled.
Young laboring Miriam, far from her people, hopes
between contractions this guy won't hurt or leave
her.
When my daughter discovered the baby Christmas
morn, she cuddled the figurine, coo'd over it.
"Mary is sleepy," she said, "Now she can rest. Her
baby is okay."
Miriam and Yusuf weren't in the cave a month later.
The Persians visited them in a house.
The star which they saw in the Orient went ahead
of them until it came and stood above the place
where the child was. (Just looking at the star
flooded them with great happiness.) So they went
inside the house and saw the baby with his mother.
On Epiphany, three wise guy figurines will ring our
doorbell. Before then I guess we'll install the
holy family in the playmobil house. The beasts'
time will have passed.
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Carols:
The Friendly Beasts (12th century France)
Burgundian Carol (Bernard de la Monnoye, 1700)
In the Bleak Midwinter (Christina Rosetti, 1872)
At the birth of the Son a great clamor took
place (Ephrem the Syrian, 4th century)
