Shopping for a miracle to come
It could happen like this.
One day, an Agnostic and a Catholic of the Rousseau school of thought find themselves rifling through picked-over Nativity Scenes in a big Canadian Tire store. Some sets come with a plywood, moss-covered stable and large-ish resin figures – all of the principal players. The Agnostic mistakes a Wise Man for Joseph.
The Canadian Tire store isn’t their first choice. The Rousseau Catholic is initially confident that a Nativity Scene, which he calls a crèche, can easily be found in any number of stores, but the Agnostic is skeptical. “Canada is pretty secular. Or, Canada is a country of many religions. I don’t know what the crèche market is like.”
The Agnostic suddenly remembers that as a child immigrant on the West Coast, she found a Nativity Scene in the trash bins behind the ritzy art-deco condominium building on Howie Avenue, which she was still pronouncing “Howie Av-uh-knee” like her parents did at that time. She and her friends collected all of the pieces of the Nativity Scene, which her family calls a szopka, and brought it home. It was a complete szopka: stable, baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, donkeys, shepherd, wise men, and the angel were all in the garbage, they told her shocked parents. The found szopka stayed with them for years. The Agnostic tells the Rousseau Catholic this story and they both shriek with laughter. The Agnostic went to Sunday school as a child and her laughter contains the residue of what some call Catholic Guilt.
The Agnostic and the Rousseau Catholic conduct an online search and it does seem like the Agnostic’s doubts were warranted: Canadian stores don’t offer a wide variety of Nativity Scenes. The American sites, on the other hand, offer a dizzying selection: felt, resin, plastic, wooden, stone Nativity Scenes beckon in many styles and sizes. One can even buy a Simpsons Nativity Scene or one made up exclusively of floating rubber duckies. The Agnostic is temporarily disarmed by a particularly cherubic Nativity Scene, but alas – the Canadian dollar no longer tops the U.S. one. Back on the Canadian side, the Ten Thousand Villages store has Nativity Scenes carved by West Bank artisans out of olive wood. They go to Queen Street West to admire the carved Nativity Scenes and are caught in a philosophical bind: these crèches are lovely, but way above their budget. They leave the Ten Thousand Villages store empty-handed. The Rousseau Catholic decides to build the stable himself – that way we only need the figures, he says. He says the crèche is cultural, not religious. The Agnostic is intrigued.
So, they find themselves in the Canadian tire store at Dundas and Bay. The selection is meagre: a few complete scenes with that plywood stable, and one figures-only set. Because the Rousseau Catholic is confident that he can build a better stable than the crappy plywood one in the big set, there’s brief excitement over the figures-only set until they discover that a figure is missing – but which one is it? They scrutinize the remaining figures – maybe the missing one isn’t that important. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, donkey, the wise men – so far, so good…Rousseau Catholic figures out that the angel is missing. The Agnostic tries to remedy the situation by relocating one of the angels from the bigger set to their chosen one, but the scale is all wrong – the imported angel towers over everyone else in the party and would necessitate the building of a huge stable. In a near-panic, the Agnostic and the Rousseau Catholic survey some individually-priced figures displayed nearby: there are donkeys, cattle, an empty manger, the wise men…but it seems that the Jesus, Mary and Josephs are sold out. There are obviously no angels.
The Agnostic wonders if the Rousseau Catholic will have time to build a stable, and they finally buy the plywood-stable-and-figures set. They bring it home and the Rousseau Catholic sets it up under their fiber-optic Christmas tree. He adds a string of lights and some frosted pine cones, and adorns the roof of the stable with live pine branches swiped minutes ago from an elaborate street display. The Agnostic surveys the scene and has about one thousand different feelings at once, most of them un-jumblable, so she pours them both a drink and goes to find her CD of traditional carols performed by the Cracov Choir. Rousseau Catholic surveys his work quietly, and says “it’s like at home.” He takes photos of the crèche and the tree, and through his camera’s eye the figures suddenly look life-like.
With the lights low and the music invoking lullabies which the Agnostic’s mother crooned over her almost before recollection, the whole set-up shifts from the absurd and new to something that, spliced together from cultural and religious bits, reshaped through each of their lenses, tweaked with her language, his language and theirs, becomes uniquely their scene.