Photo credit: Musicaline
I’ll fess up. I check our blog statistics now and then. Mostly not just to check the total clicks (though visit totals have been gratifying, thank you) but to back-track visitors and find what posts brought in the most Googlers. And this time of year an odd pattern appears. By far the most common search to wash up on these shores involves the words “Christmas crib.” And the searches, oddly, generally come from places in the Middle East. If I’m reading it right (always a questionable thesis), they generally land on this post, which says nothing at all about Christmas cribs, causing me to figure that the draw must actually be the picture of the crèche I used to illustrate it.
The term “Christmas crib” sounds strange to me. It’s not an English idiom, as far as I know. Nobody in these parts talks about Nativity Scenes that way. We call them Nativity Scenes or manger scenes, or if we’re feeling pedantic (and heaven knows I often do) we say “crèche.” But perhaps Christians in the Middle East do call them Christmas cribs. No reason why they shouldn’t. It’s a perfectly good name.
I might note (to continue in my pedantic voice, now that I’ve got it warmed up) that the Norwegian word for “manger” is in fact “krybbe.” There must be a history there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with manger scenes. But I don’t have any facts on that.
From what I’ve read, the traditional inverted A-frame wooden manger we see in Nativity Scenes is nothing at all like anything used in First Century Israel. Many scholars think Christ was born in one of the caves near Bethlehem, where sheep were stabled in those days. The mangers in those structures were made of stone masonry and were built into a corner of the wall. Which is bad for crèches, as it would badly mess up the composition.
However, another theory, which I’ve grown to favor, says that many Jewish houses of that day had an attached all-purpose room, which could be used for livestock when necessary, or could be cleaned out and turned into a guest room when the in-laws showed up. Such a room would have had a built-in manger as well, and that could explain the reference to the baby in the manger in Luke (where the word “stable” does not actually appear).
The problem with this theory is that it renders the traditional mean old innkeeper unnecessary. Which is OK with me, frankly, because he also appears nowhere in the text. And I’ve always identified with him.
The Inn Keeper is inferred from the the “No Room in the Inn” line. Though he might have been a nice inn keeper, who swept out his own family manger room for them to stay in.
Also, the Wise Men shouldn’t be there at the same time as the shepherds, but that would ruin the tableau.
You link-baiter, you.
Have we talked about this innkeeper thing before? I remember a discussion in which we (whoever we were) said they really packed people into the inns in those days, particularly with the census drawing a crowd like it did, and a home owner or innkeeper would think a bit before allowing a pregnant woman in. She could give birth that night in the company of several guests who’d prefer to be elsewhere.
What I read is that Bethlehem was so small that it’s highly unlikely that there was an inn there at all. So staying with relatives is more likely. What’s translated “inn” in the KJV is actually the Greek word for “dwelling place.”
If you really want to start a rock fight, just ask someone to find the scriptures that say Mary rode on a donkey to Bethlehem, and that the angels “sang.” You won’t get invited to any more Christmas programs at church.
I doubt that the Norwegian word for manger (krybbe) is in any way related to nativity scenes. I suppose I should at least look it up on the Google, but that would be too much work, so I’ll just share from my vast experience. On small farms all over the midwest, there are (or, at least, used to be) corn cribs, bins in which whole-cob corn was stored. The old ones are wooden, with slatted sides for air flow through the corn. Outdoor livestock feeders are also called cribs sometimes. I suspect, if one thing is named after another at all, that baby cribs are named after the feed bunks. However it works, Jesus’ first bed can rightly be called a crib.
In really small congregations the actors have to play multiple roles. After the boys in bathrobes do their shepherd thing with towels on their heads, they slip into the back room to exchange the towels for aluminium foil crowns. Then they come back as wise men with the gap of a few minutes serving to underline the delay between the nativity and the adoration on epiphany.
Look, everyone reading this site knows that Vikings didn’t wear horns on their helmets, so why complicate it by giving one of the Wise Men horns?
And to you, a magical Christmas Raspberry!