At first, I was just struck by a stand alone Joseph outside a thrift shop.
There was something oddly forlorn about him separated from the rest of the nativity. I think of “the nativity” as a set, a single unit, one piece. I snapped a picture, hoping to come back to the feelings that it evoked, maybe let the picture stand as is, thinking that other people would find it just as lonely.
And then in a different thrift store, a wise man. I took another photo, because at that point there seemed to be something to these nativity stragglers, these figures posed for their interactions with other figures, now missing their context. What is Joseph if he is not praying over Jesus? What is a Wise Man, now that he’s offering a gift to the empty shelf next to him?
This isn’t religious commentary—just a character based one. It’d be like if one of the animatronics from Disneyland, like say Snow White, or Peter Pan—was pulled from its ride, and left to perform it’s loop without the other characters making these actions make sense. Joseph doesn’t make sense kneeling high above a puddle on a ground and nothing else. And the wise man has even less for himself—he makes no sense without other wisemen, but he also makes no sense without the rest of the nativity entirely. It would still look odd to our eyes to have three wisemen and baby Jesus.
I thought about what it would be like to buy that Joseph and nothing else. To have this single kneeling figure, chipped paint, probably too hot to the touch the way a lot of vintage electrical things work. And then, after seeing the wiseman—imagine having a stragglers nativity set.
After all, a nativity is first Jesus—baby Jesus and nothing else would seem strange, but doable. Then there is Baby Jesus and Mary—I mean that’s just the classic Madonna imagery. Baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph is the poor person’s Christmas nativity (the one we had.) Are the shepherds next, or the wisemen? Probably the wisemen. And then the shepherds, and then the animals, and then, if you’re rich, and feeling extravagant, you might even include some angels.
What about a nativity that’s a sheep, Jesus, and one wiseman? How would that strike us? Or what about an angel, Joseph, and a single shepherd? The donkey without Mary? The holes in the story that make us see first that these things are figures in and of themselves—painted figurines, glowing sometimes with a lightbulb and a cord.
But mostly, all I was struck by, is that without “The Nativity” individual figures themselves just look so damn sad. They don’t look like they’re gazing down at a baby Jesus that was taken away from them. They don’t look like there’s a gap missing in their story, like they ‘see’ something that just isn’t there anymore. They just look lost, and sad, and out of place, exactly as they are.
