Christmas Letter, 2011
The Source
Forgive the repetition for a few of you, but I thought that my Christmas letter said everything I wanted to say on this holy week: The store manager shook her head. “That is the strangest Nativity scene in the store. Where’d it come from?” Fred knew, but he simply shrugged. Fred was the store’s do-it-all guy. Although well past the retirement age, he’d been allowed to stick around for far less than his old salary as a sort of handyman. If nothing else, Fred knew where everything was located because he’d worked in the department store since he was a teenager. The store was big into Christmas and specialized in the most amazing assortment of crèches.. Nativity scenes. Most families in the community could trace their own traditional manger scene to the store, and it was the go-to place for most churches. Hand-carved sets, fine crystal displays, clay fired, all the way up to the very expensive teakwood sets imported from Africa…the store had it all. And although they hired a lady to come in once a year just to set up the store’s magnificent display, it was Fred’s job to unpack the new shipments, keep the whole exhibit dusted, and to safely pack the unsold items away for next year. It was the favorite part of Fred’s job. But the rather sad part of Fred’s Christmas routine was being the first to discover any broken pieces as he’d unwrap the new shipments. “You can’t ship crystal from England every year and not expect at least a couple broken shepherds,” he’d say. Usually a replacement figure could be ordered in time for Christmas. Reordering was not the problem. The problem…at least to Fred…was what to do with the broken pieces. Of course the store policy was to simply dump the three-legged camel or the dis-staffed shepherd into the dumpster behind the store, but there was something in Fred that just wouldn’t allow that to happen. “It don’t seem right,” he’d say, and he’d tuck the one-armed Joseph and the chipped donkey into a special box under his workbench. The store had a break room for the employees and the little kitchenette became the repository for everyone’s excess Christmas cookies. If truth were known, Christmas was the only time of year when the little workers’ lounge displayed any sort of gaiety at all. Someone would string up a row of cardboard bells, another employee would bring in a plastic Christmas tree whose rotating motor had suffered some bad wiring in a Third World sweat shop, and the workers each saved a bit of postage by taping their Christmas cards to each other on the small refrigerator. It was a slap-dash little celebration but frankly, the Christmas season didn’t allow much time for lounging at this store. But on that particular year the break room was treated to a new addition….Fred’s Nativity Scene. He’d collected all the broken Wiseman and angels from Christmases past, did his best to repair or repaint what he could, and set up the display in the middle of the room’s dining table. Too call this particular crèche “eclectic,” would be kind. “Mish-mash” would be more like it. The ceramic figure of Joseph stood over a foot tall and was missing one foot, which Fred tried (a bit comically) to refashion out of molding compound. Three inch Mary was oak, hand-hewn but with a vicious chunk taken out of her left side by the tines of a loading fork on a New Jersey dock. The sheep were of all sizes, colors, and looked as if they spoke a variety of languages. Some were literally ten times bigger than their little brethren, and three broken sheep were aqua-colored, having the distinction of being the world’s only blue sheep. The Bible doesn’t state the exact number of Wisemen and Fred had five in need of repair. He hoped that the headless Wiseman didn’t offend anyone, but he hated to leave the old boy in the dumpster. Even a headless Wiseman deserves his day, thought Fred. He could never find an entire donkey so he glued together the parts of various beasts that he’d collected over the years. The donkey resembled something never before seen in most crèches, but it had to do. Camels were easy to obtain. “Those long, skinny legs just won’t stand much handling,” he said. In fact, one camel had no legs at all. Fred smoothed off the stubs and made a sitting camel. It was weird. It was wild. It bordered on the hilarious when the store’s work crew began taking their breaks on the final days before Christmas. Fred didn’t mind. He said, “That’s just us, I guess. Broken, bruised, misshapen, and sort of sad looking…all huddled around the little fella who was born to put us together again.” Have a Yourself a mending, little Christmas . . . Ken Bradbury, 2011