Diary: Patricia Storace, A Lilliputian Christmas Feast

Details from the eighteenth-century Neopolitan Baroque Crèche at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musée des Santons, Village Provençal Miniature, Grignan, France

The celebration of Christmas is a meditation on the presence of the miracle in reality—a transformation of the world seen through marvels of changing scale and of paradox. Miraculously, the darkest days of the year become its most radiant, the time of acute hunger yields a paradisal plenitude. The abundance of the Christmas table is an occasion to feast as if we were immortal. As Robert Farrar Capon, the author of The Supper of the Lamb, wrote, the meal celebrates not only the “Word, but the Flesh He came to save.’’ It also celebrates the miraculous survival of a homeless child stalked by a murderous king, the triumph of good over evil, love over cruelty. The rituals of Christmas are theater in which seemingly implacable despair changes into joy.

At its heart is the miraculous birth of a human baby—who is also God incarnate for Christians, a divine witness in other traditions. In the Islamic Nativity, the child Jesus speaks from the cradle, articulating his love of God.

The newborn child changes the nature of the world, making the impossible possible. The bare stable that is his birthplace is a revelation of paradise. The unseen becomes visible, what is tiny is recognized as cosmic, and great kings no longer live for money and power, but deliver both up to the tender infant, kneeling in reverence instead to infinite goodness.

The baby in the manger is the smallest figure at the center of the traditional Christmas crèche, but the infant draws toward the stable an entire miniature world in pilgrimage. The ubiquitous crèches you see in neighborhood streets and shop façades in Spain, Italy, France, and elsewhere are peopled with a whole social milieu, the secular world contributing its particular gifts to the sacred world, including gifts of food they grow or cook. In the famous Provençal terra cotta santon “little saint” scenes (a craft in which women like Thérèse Neveu, honored by the great Provençal poet, Frédéric Mistral, have excelled), the community bears an anthology of its characteristic regional food to the Holy Family. There can be fish sellers, winemakers, farmers’ wives with baskets of eggs on their heads, bakers, chestnut sellers with portable stoves, olive sellers, a man carrying a Christmas