N THE BLEAK MIDWINTER—[W, 12-11-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER—[W, 12-11-24]

 

I’m so glad that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and not in Arcola, Illinois, at least not in 1993. Those swaddling clothes would not even be close to keeping a baby warm that Christmas Eve.

We had a farmer in the congregation who had added some llamas to his sheep field. At Christmas time, they looked sort of like camels, the ones from Orientar, where the wise men hailed from. So someone said, “Let’s have a live nativity scene on the church lawn! We’ve got sheep and pseudo-camels, and there’s no reason a pig couldn’t have been there when Jesus was born.” [Yes, there was; haven’t you heard about Jews and pork? At least we got that idea off the table before people showed up in bath robes with dish towels on their heads and actually started unloading a garden shed for a stable, and hay bales, and a menagerie that included a cat.]

Authenticity in a live nativity isn’t really an issue, because no one knows what that scene in Bethlehem really amounted to, except that it probably bore no resemblance at all to the ones we put on Christmas cards and wrapping paper. Cold, however, is an issue!

I can’t remember exactly how cold it got that night, but 80 below zero, F, is probably a good guess. The angels didn’t even bother to appear. I have never been so cold, and I lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for eight years. No one could take it for long. First Joseph headed to the church basement, for hot chocolate. Then the cat. Then Mary and the baby. Then the wise men, who were not really wise or they would not have waited that long. The shepherds followed… but that left the “camels” and sheep on their own.

The "camels" could see that the Baptists down the alley to the north looked warm, and so did the Catholics, down the alley to the south, who were also sort of Baptist, since their church was called St. John the Baptist. The animals went in both directions, so to spread the news of the holy birth more quickly, to those “lesser breeds without the law.”

I tell this story only because it is a story about Christmas, and this is the Christmas season. Yes, it was an attempt to be a witness to the whole town. But this story is really without a “point.” Except for the obvious one.

Just because you have something that looks like a camel…

John Robert McFarland