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...customs of Christmas are many, but none are more enduring than the creation of a crèche, centered about the watching Mary and the Christ child asleep in a manger. The magnificent 18th century creche on TIME'S cover this week is one of the famous Neapolitan presepios that delighted King Charles III of Naples and his queen, who sewed garments of silk and velvet for such exquisitely wrought figurines. Using the simplest of materials-vegetable fibers on wire skeletons, wooden hands and feet, earthenware heads-noted Italian sculptors created these figures, which now enact the Christmas story...
This swaddled image lying in the damp, cramped cavern where Jesus may actually have been born is the center and model of numberless Nativity scenes all over the world. Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox or sectarian, there are crèches today almost everywhere there are Christians. There are Nativities as sumptuous as the presepio (manger) in Rome's 11th century Church of Ara Coeli (Altar of Heaven) on Capitoline Hill, with its Christ child-legendarily carved by St. Luke himself-so bedecked with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls and gold that its form is barely discernible and the surplus treasure...
...Jungle. There are mechanical crèches, including that of the local St. Vincent de Paul Society in Beirut, Lebanon, which is 35 ft. by 23 ft., with foot-high Wise Men, shepherds, animals moving in opposite directions against a papier-mâché background of Judea. Overhead, the Star of Bethlehem and angels wheel through the sky, real rain falls, water turns a mill wheel, and on a silken coverlet a Christ child (wired for six volts) raises his head and opens his blue eyes...
There are cheap cardboard crèches, turned out by the thousands in busy factories, and there are others whose making is a joyful family tradition; one Madrid family lives in an apartment so small that their crèche completely fills it; they haul it up to the ceiling and sleep beneath. There are crèches in churches, in public squares, even in bars-a notable one is located in the English Bar in Nazareth...
...Second Bethlehem. After the elements of the Nativity scene were established, the first recorded real crèche was made in 1223 by St. Francis of Assisi. Christmas had always been for him the "Feast of Feasts" when "God condescended to be fed by human love." In the church at the town of Greccio, three years before he died, St. Francis preached before a manger filled with hay, beside which stood an ox and an ass. Wrote an early biographer, Thomas of Celano: "Greccio was transformed almost into a second Bethlehem, and that wonderful night seemed like the fullest...