The editor of a life-style magazine in a neighboring city reached out to our local
Church leaders in an attempt to find material for their Holiday/December edition
about diverse religious groups in our area and now they celebrate the season..
In the course of their search for suitable candidates, my name and my biennial
Nativity Festival came up. I was contacted for possible inclusion in the magazine
article. I subsequently submitted pictures and a short essay about my beautiful
collection of over 500 Nativity -related sets.
Though the magazine was looking for something less specific than one person's
celebration of Christmas, this invitation gave me an opportunity to give a short
review of the background of my Christmas delight over the years.
I was a young married woman with two little boys ages two and four when the
Women’s Auxiliary in our Congregation invited me to teach a Christmas lesson
about the birth of the Savior. By the time I had studied for that assignment,
including commentary about Mary and Joseph plus the art music and literature
dedicated to the birth of Jesus, my idea of how to celebrate Christmas had
completely changed.
Growing up I had been a Santa Claus kind of kid, focusing more on the presents
and the parties with just a passing thought that we were supposed to be
celebrating the advent of Christ.
After that transforming experience, it was my desire to have a beautiful Nativity
set and make my focus the true meaning of Christmas. But we were a young
family with no money in the budget for something as splendid as that. So, my
husband went into the back yard, cut a small branch and made a stable out of
twigs and bark. We made people out of cardboard cones topped by painted
beads for heads and let our toddlers help dress them in scraps from my sewing
basket. Then we raided the toy box, and put farm animals into the stable. One
of the Wisemen carried a screw covered in aluminum foil, another held a shiny
piece of gold cardboard. The third had a foil-wrapped bouillon cube for his
offering.
We displayed that crude little Nativity set every Christmas for a long time until it
became a family tradition.
Several years later our family had the fortuitous experience of living in Europe a
couple of times. When we returned from our adventures, we had many beautiful
keepsakes as reminders of those wonderful opportunities with my husband’s
work. However, it is our Christmas collection from Sweden and Germany that
have become the most prized reminders of our time abroad.
My first desire was to share those Christmas keepsakes with friends and
neighbors, so I decided to invite them to come to our home and share the
delightful Christmas experiences we had had through a display of our treasures.
Among them were lovely Nativity sets. That was in the late 1980’s and continued
in that same way for a
few years.
But over the ensuing years as I collected additional Christmas Nativity sets during
my own travels, the display expanded into a biennial Nativity Festival that fills our
home every other year with only our lovely Nativity-related pieces that now
number about 500. That includes Nativity decorations for three trees. Plus, I have
been the happy recipient of many Nativity sets from friends who have gifted me
with those special reminders from
their travels around the world!
Then I began to be more intentional about this sacred opportunity to bear
testimony of Christ’s birth on that auspicious occasion so long ago. An invitation
to a broader audience seemed appropriate. Hence, a flyer as specific invitation
with dates and times our home would be open is delivered by hand—and now
also through email and other social media—to a broader audience. I have even
put the flyers on the bulletin boards of local businesses with great success.
At a time when the sacred event of Christ’s birth is almost all but forgotten during
the busy Christmas season, I am grateful for an occasion to celebrate Christ’s
birth with the attention it deserves in our hectic world of Christmas elves and
gnomes and woodland animals.
I have sensed the same gratitude from the visitors who have come to our home to
commemorate a genuine, Christ-centered Christmas with
us.
That “ONE WONDERFUL NIGHT” of the Savior’s birth is truly
a reason to rejoice!
Georgia Nichols
Johnstown, Colorado
October 2024
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