A cheap lamb for Christmas

The part of the Christmas story that moves me the most is the babe lying in a stable among animals.

Frowzy and drowsy, curious and accepting, the animals watch, shifting from hoof to hoof, coming closer, the donkey with his soft nose, the curly lamb, the big, haughty-looking camel who spits at impolite moments.

The animals were my favorite figures in the dime store Nativity scene my mother bought when I was a child.

"I bought the cheapest Nativity scene I could find because I wanted you to be able to play with it," she told me when I was older. "I didn't want to have to tell you to leave it alone because it was expensive."

I think of that sometimes when I'm in someone's home and I see an expensive, artisanal, Nativity scene the couple's kids can't touch.

"They can't play with the lamb," I think. "They can't pick up the baby Jesus."

What good is the baby Jesus if he's so expensive you can't touch him? What good is the lamb if he is high up on a forbidden shelf?

The point of the story is supposed to be that everyone can touch the baby and that the story begins in dung and straw and dirt and taking to the road because of bad politics.

And the animals knew first. The Wise Men were kings, and like most kings, they were late to the party, and they hoped to make up for it with fancy presents. They brought gold, frankincense and myrrh. Not one of them showed up with a blanket or something to eat. They'd come to see a king, not a cold, hungry child, because cold, hungry children don't draw the attention of kings.

The animals lent their warmth to the babe, their comfort. It was their stink on the straw, their breath in the babe's face, the whole scene connected to the earth the way a man's arm is connected to his shoulder, the whole round earth reflected in the eyes of a donkey.

I played with the figure of the babe, with Joseph and Mary and the Wise Men, but I first felt the story holding a dime store figure of a sheep on the great plain of our living room carpet, not too far from where the mountain of the sofa rose toward the frosted windows of the old house we rented in a New England mill town.

I had a dog, a big boxer named Joey, who slept under the covers with me and scratched my back with his claws and blew his hot, stinking breath in my face. I needed his warmth on the second floor of the old drafty house where I went to bed on cold nights under two blankets, wearing pajamas and long underwear, and where I sometimes woke to find a thin skim of ice on the water of the toilet.

I'm writing this on the Tuesday before Christmas, on the second floor of an old house. Two cats sleep in the living room. One of them, the gray striped one, sleeps next to my ankles on these cold nights, a little lump of warmth against the chill that makes its way through the house's old bones.

Things get better, and they get worse. The word of a king sends people homeless on the roads. The wise men offer slogans when what you need is soup.

I learned the old story with a cheap Nativity scene, a little plaster lamb and the warmth of a big dog on a cold night, and I have never fallen prey to fancier interpretations of the story, to the babe the children can't touch.

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