The Manger Massacre of ‘06
On a chilly day in January that began with snow and ended with slaughter, my mother and I made the fatal decision to at last take down our Christmas ornaments. These many yuletide knickknacks included an irritatingly cheerful Christmas clock, a tree that was at least as old, shriveled, and incapable of dying as Clint Eastwood, and, most importantly, an ancient ceramic nativity scene.
“Joseph? Mary? Baby Jesus?”
“Check.”
“Multiracial wise men?”
“Check.”
“Barnyard friends?”
“Check.”
“Okay, great,” said my mom, rubbing her hands together. “Let’s tape it shut and get it back in the attic.”
As I passed her the box, I glanced down at the tightly-packed pieces for a moment and wondered how we had wound up with this piece of Christmas cheer anyway. I suppose that nativity scene, ordinary though it was, always had a special sort of mythos to it, for it was the only item in our house whose origins were almost completely unknown to both my mother and me. Its end, of course, would haunt our dreams for the rest of our lives.
“Do we have any more tape?” my mother asked, taking the box out of my willing hands.
I glanced to the dispenser on my right and shook my head. “Nope. Guess we used the last of it to pack up the baubles.” I paused thoughtfully. “Why do they call them that, anyway?”
“Because that’s the sound they make when your cat chases them across the kitchen floor.”
I looked to the open nativity box for a moment and frowned, wondering how something that hadn't even seemed to exist until a few years ago could cause us so much trouble. Not to say it had spontaneously generated in our attic, of course – though, when you consider the amount of Christian kitsch in my home, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had just appeared one day, springing up from a celestial union between a bejeweled crucifix and a family heirloom Bible.
A miracle like that wouldn’t have always been possible in our house. My German Catholic mother inherited a subtle, practical sort of religion, the kind that impels you to go to church every week but doesn’t ask you to have ten children because of the inherent evils of the Trojan Man. As such, we kept the standard quota of Christian items in our house – a simple crucifix in the bedroom, a faded Bible slipped under the coffee table – and considered ourselves religiously well-represented. That was before my mother met and later married Mike the Stepfather, who introduced us to a level of devotion to Christian knickknacks the likes of which few mortals have dared to imagine.
“Should I go get some tape?” I asked, glancing around helpfully, as if thinking the tape might magically appear as well.
“Oh…” My mother sighed and stared at the box. “No, don’t worry about it. There’s a little Scotch still stuck to the top from last year. Hm…” She set her finger to the tape and, when it reached out its fading, sticky tendrils in a feeble attempt to attach itself to one last warm soul, she nodded and promptly jerked her hand away again, dashing its hopes into oblivion. “Yeah, it’ll be okay. Let’s finish this up.”
I followed her as she stood and moved towards the attic, giving little thought to our decisions and much more to the stepfather who had brought this brief dilemma into our lives in the first place. He is an Irish Catholic, and like many Irish Catholics he is perfectly normal in every aspect of his life except when it comes to home decor. From the shamrock-adorned napkin basket reading “Erin go Bragh” to the Irish china doll above the computer whose eyes always seemed to be watching you type, his house practically screamed heritage awareness. This has always been a fascinating concept for my mother and me, since our most German artifact is an unused stein that was probably made in Ohio.
But even this paled to the flashing neon lights of Catholicism. The bottle of Holy Water was surprising enough, but we knew we were dealing with something legendary when we saw the ten-foot long rosary. Looking back and remembering my own mild paranoia any time I walked past that crucifix that was about as wide as my head, I shiver to wonder what my more secular friends must have thought. They must have developed a healthy fear of my stepdad, which could only have been made worse by the fact that no one could ever entirely understand the words that came out of his mouth. He was either a very talented mumbler or a very bad ventriloquist. He helped out at a bar run by the Knights of Columbus, and to this day I am still convinced that he often went there to “pay the bills and kill the cougars.” My mother assures me that he went there to “pay the bills and fill the coolers,” but I look both ways before entering just to be safe.
The Holy Water and the giant rosary were small inconveniences, but some of the things my stepdad brought with him were actually quite nice. Take, for instance, the nativity scene that rode in my mother’s hands toward its attic home. Again, I’m not entirely sure where it came from, only to say that it came with him. I think it belonged to his mother, but it might have gone further back than that, even to a little customs station on Ellis Island, boxed up with other artifacts that managed to escape the great potato famine. It was definitely old, crafted out of ceramic and packed lovingly in Styrofoam (a precious commodity at the time of the potato famine, I’m told). Of course none of those details did a thing to stop the Awful Disaster which follows.
My mother climbed into the attic and I, using a ladder, hefted the boxes up to her one at a time. Everything went smoothly, and box after box of holiday joy returned to its rightful place. I then grabbed the nativity box, hoisting it up to my mother. I waited until I heard her mutter, “Okay, I’ve got it,” and then released my hold.
And that’s when the killing began.
The Styrofoam container burst open, showering me in a hailstorm of ceramic figurines. I brought up my hands to protect myself, my mother grabbed at the box in a weak attempt to keep some of the figures safe, curses flew through the air like cannon fire at Gettysburg, and the sounds of crashing stable inhabitants echoed ‘round the world.
And then, finally, it was over.
I turned slowly around, glancing at the shattered nativity figures that lay strewn about the garage floor. The tiny fragments had scattered from one end of the garage to the other, and then had marched into the house and infiltrated the landing. The massacre had ended, but it had left its brutal mark. Silence reigned in the small garage. And then, quietly, a voice broke the deadly hush:
“Oh Mom, I think we killed the baby Jesus.”
“Did anybody make it?” my mother asked in a whisper that quivered on tears.
“Um...” I stepped slowly down the ladder, tiny bits of wise men crunching under my feet. I smiled hopefully, reaching down and picking up one decapitated figure. “Well, the shepherd lost his head, but otherwise he’s okay...” I paused, examined him further, and corrected myself. “Oops, wait, the lamb in his arms is decapitated, too. Wow, that’s a really clean cut...”
“I saved the sheep and Joseph’s head,” my mother called down from the top of the ladder.
“Just his head? How’d you manage that?”
“I have no idea.”
I shuffled around through the carnage, searching for more survivors. “Oh, here’s Mary...” I reached down to grab the statuette, then paused to bend over again and pick up another smaller piece. I held them up to my mother like an offering. “...And here’s Mary’s face,” I ended with a weak giggle.
“This isn’t funny!” my mother said, forcing back a hysterical giggle of her own, the kind that says you’re either going to start laughing or crying, and you still aren’t entirely certain which it will be. She tucked the nativity box under her arm and descended the ladder, glancing around at the little bits of slaughter and shaking her head. “Well, let’s get this mess cleaned up. We’ll have to buy another one, I guess.”
Always looking for the bright spot, I waved my hand as if to wipe away her worries. “Oh Mom, we could put some of this back together. Mary’s almost completely whole...” I glanced at the statuette again, frowning and rephrasing my statement. “No, I lied, her hands are missing too. Maybe we could find them.”
“Rihga, it’s over,” my mother said, finality ringing in her voice. “The manger is gone.”
I sighed. “I guess so.” I placed the almost-whole shepherd on the landing, sitting Mary and her head next it. “I’ll get the broom.”
My mother glanced at the two statuettes, calling after me, “That really doesn’t look right, placing Mary’s head at her feet like that.”
“Yeah, and the saddest part is that she doesn’t have any hands to pick it up with.”
“Rihga!”
“Sorry Mom. Here’s the broom.” I offered up the little brown brush, grabbed another of my own, and the two of us set to work destroying the evidence. As I swept, I couldn’t help commenting, “We’re not gonna tell Mike about this, are we?”
“We will... probably... in a couple of days.”
“Oh, gosh, there’s a hand...” I said sadly, scooping the little brown body part into my dustpan. “Still clutching at its Frankincense...”
“That’s terrible!” my mother chided, dumping her own pile of assorted and shattered limbs into the trash. She glanced down at the ceramic dust, coating the floor like blood at a crime scene, and said to herself, “You know, I really don’t have to tell him for another couple of months.”
“Not until next Christmas, even.”
Silence, broken by several quick swishes of the broom, then:
“We don’t have to tell him at all.”
“It’ll just quietly disappear...”
“And we’ll say ‘We put it up there last year!’”
“The perfect murder.”
“Would you stop that?”
When the floor was swept and the casualties counted, the sheep remained the only survivor of that fateful encounter with the garage floor. He may need several years of therapy before he can ever step into a stable again. When asked to comment on this tragedy, the sheep responded:
“Baaaaaaa.”
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