Culture’s touch

Baby Jesus wears blue jeans and a western shirt.

The Wise Men are Indian chiefs, one in full headdress.

Instead of gold, frankincense and myrrh, gifts include water, corn and a drum.

The University of Dayton, Ohio, has assembled a collection of 1,200 Nativity scenes from 45 countries, and one thing stands out immediately: Creches reveal what’s important to a culture.

Artists make the birth of Jesus more relevant by wrapping it in their local customs, costumes and values.

The Pueblo Indian scene with Jesus in jeans is just one example. Visions of the Nativity in the university’s collection are as different as the places that produced them.

A clown – holding a string of red, yellow and green-with-white-spot balloons – is in one German scene that also is festooned with a snowman, a Santa Claus and a walking puppeteer. A figure in a long white beard smokes a pipe with a curved stem.

German creches often include Santa.

“The Germans are very much into St. Nicholas,” said Tim Bennett, an associate professor at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. “It’s a reflection of the gift-giving.”

In a Mexican set, Mary and Jesus lie in the sand surrounded by cactus and burnt-orange pottery figures in sombreros. Standing with his back to the others is Satan, who has the skull of a cow on his head and is clutching a pitchfork and bottle of liquor.

The use of Satan comes from the days when the Spanish conquistadors used the fear of the devil to convert Mexico’s Mayan Indians to Christianity, said Artimus Keiffer, assistant professor of geography at Wittenberg.

“It was either Satan or Christ. You picked one or the other,” he said.

In one Pueblo scene, the stable is replaced with an adobe hut, and the manger with a cradleboard, used by nomadic tribes to carry babies. Bears, lizards, snakes and frogs circle Mary, Joseph and Jesus.

The clay figures have crude hands and faces and are cast in soft earthen hues of brown and tan.

The pottery figurines are Christian in origin but also have strong cultural features, said Roten, who also directs the International Marian Research Institute, a center for research into the role of Mary in Christian life.

“The only part of the figures that is highly developed is the mouth and nose,” he said. “The nose is the connecting organ with nature – it’s how we receive the breath of life and is a characteristic of living beings.

“Similarly, the open, rounded mouth speaks of food for life and also reflects the popular tradition of storytelling.”

Robin Margaret Jensen, professor of history of Christian art and worship at Vanderbilt University, said people transfer the Nativity scene into one from their own culture so it makes sense to them.

Churches were the first to create Nativity scenes, in the 13th century, followed by rich and prominent people who had their own sets created.

In the 1800s, figures began to appear that resembled people found in the artists’ own towns and villages, said the Rev. John Guiliani, a Redding, Conn., artist who has painted Nativity scenes and lectured on the significance of Nativity stories.

For example, he said, scenes created by artists from the Naples area of Italy often featured fishermen, peasants and merchants surrounding the manger.

A Swiss set shows a snowcapped stable surrounded with fir trees. Felt hats with feathers commonly worn in the Alps ride the heads of the figures, who use walking sticks to trudge to the stable through drifts of snow.

A stack of firewood hugs the side of the stable.

A French countryside scene features a water well and herds of sheep, which flank homes with orange tile roofs and stone chimneys. Female villagers in long dresses and shawls make their way to the manger.

One set collected in Nigeria in the 1960s features intricately carved wooden figures by the side of a stream.

Some have umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun. Some women are carrying stacks of firewood on their heads.

“We quite rightly should want to see Nativity scenes in all the different cultures,” Jensen said.

“We don’t know what Mary and Jesus looked like. It addresses the problem of always showing them as Western Europeans.”