Crossing Point
ANNIVERSARIES can be big or small, happy or sad, deeply significant or really not that important in the grand scheme of things.
Some will mean different things to different people, a case in point being the 35th wedding anniversary which my wife and I celebrated a couple of months back – understandably very important to the pair of us, yet just as understandably not that relevant to you.
The year now ending has had a fair few anniversaries worth noting, from the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death to the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook and his crew becoming the first Europeans to cross into the Antarctic Circle (I confess that this one had passed me by completely).
Then there was the centenary of Howard Carter opening Tutankhamun’s tomb. And what about the 70 years that have passed since Ian Fleming published Casino Royale, the first Bond novel?
Just as we are about to be drained dry of 2023 altogether, I would like to put in a special plea for one of this year’s true biggies in the field.
Never mind your ‘silvers’ and your ‘goldens’. Oh no! And away with any hint of ‘centenary this’ or ‘tercentenary that’. These are barely contenders at all in this game; mere bystanders at the touchline of Anniversary Park.
Today I would like to take you back a full 800 years to a groundbreaking event which is a bit of a Christmas cracker of an anniversary: the creation of the world’s first nativity scene on Christmas Eve 1223.
The setting is the beautiful Italian hill town of Greccio, where Francis of Assisi is about to invent Christmas as we know it. That, I know, is quite a bold claim to make, yet it is not without foundation, so please bear with me, if you will.
Up until Francis came along, the Church of the mediaeval world had stored up its winter celebrations for the feast of the Epiphany, the arrival of the Wise Men with their precious and meaningful gifts for the infant Jesus. There would be gold for kingship, frankincense for divinity and myrrh for death. Because of Epiphany, the Christian faith was able to offer the world the bright idea of giving gifts around the turn of the year. And why not?
But in that year of 1223, the celebratory spotlight would start to shift away from the coming of those three noble visitors (January 6) back to the birth of Jesus (December 25). Basically, Francis co-ordinated the acting out of the first Christmas story, with live people used to play the parts of the major characters.
Inevitably, it proved to be a great success and soon the word was out, with other people in other places doing likewise. There would be sculptures and paintings and, in the fullness of time, the pretty little nativity sets which so many churches and homes display around Christmas.
Today, of course, nativity scenes do their best to show Jesus centre stage, surrounded by Mary and Joseph with shepherds and sheep coming in from one side and Wise Men and gifts approaching from the other. The use of sheep and camels would seem to be optional, though I would have them in there any day of the festive week.
Nativity scenes, whether in wood of stone, glass or plastic, help us to focus on the Bible stories of Jesus’ birth in a far distant manger. This Christmas Eve maybe you could cast your imagination back those eight long centuries to a tiny chapel in central Italy and a deep-thinking Francis of Assisi who might just have given us the Christmas we know and love, all thanks to his live-action nativity scene.