December 12, 2006
Tuesday

In my recent rant about popular confusion concerning the Immaculate Conception, I happened to mention that if you wanted your crèche to appear accurate, you shouldn’t place your magi alongside the shepherds, because the two events surely occurred at different times and in different places. Likewise, representations of camels, donkeys, oxen, three kings with crowns (“and one of them is black!”), and angels hanging from the rafters of a stable are part of the popular perception of what a Nativity scene should look like. But if you stuck with exactly what the texts of Luke and Matthew report, you wouldn’t have much of a display, and what kind of Christmas decorating would that be?

We don’t go for scriptural accuracy at House of DeAngelis. We go for popular perception, with a few personal tweaks, and some fun thrown in. At left you see a closeup of what our tabletop crèche looks like. There’s Joseph on the left and Mary on the right. The manger is empty (because we don’t place the figure of the Baby Jesus until Christmas Eve). The ox and the ass are positioned so as to appear to breathe on the infant to keep him warm (even though he isn’t there yet). The camel on the right, leering at the camera, seems a little close in — Lynn must have done that. I’d have placed it well outside the stable. The figure of the angel that doesn’t appear to match the other figures represents Lynn and calls to mind the two little angels that didn’t match the set of my childhood Christmases, given by a family friend in the 1950s to represent me and my sister.

And, back there between the ox and the ass, is Alf.

Yes, Alf, or ALF (Alien Life Form), the central character in a television sitcom that ran on NBC from 1986 to 1990. Alf was a creature from the planet Melmac who sought haven in the home of a typical middle class suburban family after his space ship crash-landed in their yard. A parody of the movie E.T., the series was so popular that in 1990 the hamburger chain Wendy’s offered plastic figurines of Alf in various costumes as the toy in the children’s meal.

That was the year of my first party. One of my guests arrived with her grumpy two-year-old in tow. The child had not wanted to get dressed up and had definitely not wanted to come. I opened the door to greet my friend and her sullen child, who glared at me briefly and then looked away. She was clutching the Alf figurine she had been playing with when she’d been interrupted. The mother apologized for the child’s disposition. I said it was perfectly all right, and perfectly understandable.

There were a lot of small children at the party that year. Or, you might say, a lot of the children who still come to the party were very small that year. Lynn was five, the Klein boys were five and seven, the youngest girl next door, who now drives herself to school, wasn’t walking yet. At one point things veered toward chaos. Some component of Lynn’s Fisher-Price Play Kitchen became an object of contention, there was some shouting, the unit wobbled, and then toppled over. I remember turning to my friend and saying dreamily, “Oh, Marilyn! Isn’t this just like summer!” The kids settled their differences, the kitchen got put back in order, and all was well.

Much later that night, after everyone was gone and a lot of the cleanup had been accomplished, I went through the rooms making sure all the food was put away and turning out the lights. As I bent to unplug the light we have inside the crèche’s stable, I beheld Alf, standing behind the empty manger.

I should have taken the figure out, put it in my purse, and dropped it off at its owner’s house. But I didn’t. When Epiphany came and all the decorations were finally put away, Alf got boxed up with all the other manger scene characters. When he appeared the next year, we simply put him in place, and have continued to do so.

Much of this season is about learning to be generous, to respond to God’s abundance in the gift of himself by giving of ourselves to others. Alf’s presence reminds us of a time that the least among us gave the most that she had. What better illustration of the True Meaning could we ask for?

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