At Southwood, Advent takes the more practical form of Christmas-themed crafts and stories, and an effort to bring extra food, along with jackets and other warm clothing donations.
Today’s craft is a Christmas ornament made of foam pieces that the kids can paste together with glue sticks. Most of the Southwood kids have trouble with complicated crafts; coloring and pasting are about all they can handle without extensive help. Bree, my adult daughter, has begun coming to Southwood, and together we keep the kids on track and make sure glue sticks are shared, everyone is listening to the instructions, no one is fighting or insisting that pieces are needed from another child’s kit, everyone understands the instructions, and everyone’s pieces are glued together the right way. This project has a number of pieces, and requires a little patience to achieve the desired result: a foam infant smiling from a foamy manger under a smiling star, with the caption, “God’s Greatest Gift.”
A couple of the kids express dismay that the serrated yellow pieces of the kit are meant to represent hay, not blankets. A few don’t know what “hay” is, so I explain that it’s a kind of dried grass that animals eat for food. I check on their understanding of “manger,” and that’s a good thing, because, although they all know the traditional story by heart, none of them know what all the words mean. A few of the kids think the manger is a kind of room or stable. A few kids understand that an “inn” is a place to stay; many of the welfare motels in Anaheim contain “inn” as part of the name. Of these kids, a few have “manger” confused with “manager,” as in “motel manager,” with the vague idea that Jesus was born in the motel manager’s office.
Actually, that’s not too far off the mark.
As Bree and I work around the table, making sure each child is able to complete each step of the craft project, we help the kids understand the words in the story. The inn is like a motel. There wasn’t any room there for a lady about to have a baby, so Mary and Joseph ended up with the animals in the stable, sort of like how sometimes people end up having to sleep in someone’s garage when they can’t afford a motel room. The manger, we explain, is a food holder for animals to eat from, so it was filled with hay, the animals’ food.
This brings a surprising flurry of disagreement from the kids. Jesus is God’s son. How could God’s son sleep in the middle of pet food? With no blankets? Didn’t Mary have baby stuff with her? Couldn’t they buy some?
“Well,” I explain, “Jesus was poor.”
The shock is evident on the kids’ faces, and they start to argue. No way! Jesus was rich! Kings brought him gifts. He could do miracles—why wouldn’t he have anything anyone could want? The Southwood kids are poor; they understand the difficulties of life on the downward spiral. Jesus chose to come here. Who would choose to be born poor, to worry about food and shelter on a daily basis? Their reaction reminds me of a quote from Carolyn Chute, who has said that her writing about poverty was “involuntarily researched.” Chute said:
"I have lived poverty. I didn't choose it. No one would choose humiliation, pain, and rage."
But, that’s exactly what Jesus did. We go through some parts of the story of Jesus’s life that the kids aren’t so familiar with: how he said he had no home, no place to lay his head; how he had to get his tax money from a fish; how he loved and defended the poor every day of his life. He could have chosen to be rich, but he didn’t. He chose to be poor.
Slowly, it dawns on them. Jesus was one of them.
Jesus, our brother, strong and good,
Was only born in a stable rude,
And the friendly beasts around him stood,
Jesus, our brother, strong and good.
Was only born in a stable rude,
And the friendly beasts around him stood,
Jesus, our brother, strong and good.
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