I love stories, simply love them. Our lives are full of stories, surrounded by them. As soon as my daughters come in from school and tell me about their days or when my husband tells me who he bumped into in the supermarket, they are narrating their own stories and inviting me to be a part.
Traditional stories can be even more fun because we know them by heart and we can enter into them, wondering what the characters looked or felt like. The Christmas Nativity story is among the most well known of the traditional stories, handed down generation to generation for round abouts 2000years.
For me and my family (and many others across the globe) it has a deeper meaning. It is the point at which God's amazing love entered into the world in the world in silence and vulnerability. It is a wonder in itself.
So how do we hand on this tradition to the next generation? How do we wonder through the wonder? Nowadays, there are many, many books telling the Christmas story (I'm sure we're nearly in double figures at our house!). I have a bit of a book obsession and I love snuggling up with the girls to read stories but for the first thousand years or so, this story was passed on to each other through memory and through song. And there is something magic about that.
This year, as a family we wont be going to a Church on Christmas Eve or Christmas day for the first time in all of our lives. But we will still be choosing to enter into the wonder together. We will still be able to sing the carols, still follow the service online (even our daughters school nativity was online this year) but one of the ways we have found to tell the story is to let the children get involved in it.
We currently have about seven nativity sets of various size, shape and colours. Two are hanging decorations, one is a miniature picked up by my Aunty last year, another a finger puppet set, one is a silhouette version I found going cheap in a shop post Christmas just after we got married and finally got round to repainting, one is an amazing knitted set which we are baby sitting for Church and one is a pre-loved and slightly chipped wooden set we bought from Facebook last year. They tend to emerge from December onwards and the kids play with them in different ways. One year, the playmobil people moved into the stable (Mary even managed to get a nights sleep in a proper dolls house bed!)and another year the hanging set was hung over the piano so we could see them while we sang carols. This year, we have taken the 'knitivity' on a journey around our local town, sharing where they are everyday, we've used the silhouettes as part of our 'streets of light' window display organised by the local churches together and the others are in various parts around the house. I've found the miniature one stuffed full of fallen Christmas tree leaves to keep Baby Jesus warm and I've heard my youngest put Joseph on time out for jumping on the baby! But this is all part of them joining in the wonder of the story. It makes me wonder if it was cold? I wonder how Mary and Joseph kept Jesus warm? How smelly would that stable have been? How scared were the shepherds? Was Joseph really ok with all this extra responsibility? Who was the mystery inkeeper? Did they use time out back then?
Lets always keep wondering!
Merry Christmas!
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