Paper Nativity Origin Story
When I selected which college I wanted to attend, I deliberately picked the school down the road from where my family lived, so that they and I could have a little bit of space from each other. But in the summer after my senior year of high school, my mom got a job a couple of thousand miles away. Suddenly I was much further from home than I had imagined I would be. Back in Ye Olden Dayes, long distance phone charges were a thing, and after the first month of paying a phone bill where I noticed that it was 60 cents a minute to call my parents and 25 cents a minute to call my sister (who was going to college in the aforementioned hometown), I started calling my sister a lot more often.
In some ways this was actually not terrible. I got a solid taste of living on my own, and I enjoyed several aspects of it. Since I had both a scholarship and a Pell grant, I felt less money pressure than I had in ages. I enjoyed cooking for myself and occasionally for my roommate, though it was a little bit of an adjustment from the cooking-for-at-least-eight I had done when I lived at home. I felt fairly independent; I could walk downtown from my apartment, and I took the bus to school.
I also got (emotionally) closer to my sister, which was nice. I was living with a woman I had known when we were both kids attending the same pull-out program way back in elementary school, and re-made friends with when we decided to live together in college. We made close friends very quickly, and this summer, more than two decades after we shared that apartment, I’m going to visit her and her family for a week.
But in other ways it was very lonely, and especially at Christmas, I longed to feel like I could do something to decorate. My ideas about budget have expanded since that time, but the way I thought about things then, I was completely sure that Christmas decorations were not possible for me to buy.
Making, on the other hand, was a completely different story. My roommate/bestie looked on with a sort of fascinated horror as I worked. She was sure I wouldn’t finish, and it turned out she was right— but to this day I’m glad I tried.
I got a cereal box and cut it, then glued it, to form a sort of standing shell (like a mini band shell) to represent the stable that I’d heard was probably a cave. The glue I used was paper mache made with flour and water. I figured out that I could make it look sort of rock-colored by mixing dirt into it, so after I had gotten the box into the shape I wanted and the first round of glue had dried, I used the dirt-y paper-mache to plaster the whole inside of the cave model.
And that was all I got done by the time the Christmas season arrived. I was kind of bummed about it, and maybe that has been wandering around my back brain this whole time, waiting until I was ready to right the wrong by finishing the project. I’m pretty sure if that cardboard cave were still around, the paper nativity would look pretty good in it. And I hope that if there are any lonely 18-year-olds this Christmas season with excellent eye-hand coordination and time to burn, they can find the nativity and make something for their space that feels just right. (Also, about the budget thing: I really am serious that if you feel too poor to pay what I’m charging, you should email me and we will work something out. Jesus was poor, too, at least at certain critical points in His life.)
