The Tail End of Christmas
Contemplating the Creche
The ox and the ass.
In Advent of 2020, I was asked to work on a writing project reflecting on the characters in the Nativity to be published the following year. The cast was divvied up to different writers. One was assigned the shepherds and angels. Another was to write on the magi. Another, the Holy Family.
I was assigned the ox and the ass.
If you read that with a big “womp womp” sound effect at the end of that sentence, we are on the same page, friend. The language was later changed to the ox and the donkey, which I thought further illustrated that they were not exactly the assignment one would hope for. It’s as if they needed shined up a little to be less jarring and more family friendly.
The ox and the donkey.
If I’m being honest, old wounds of self esteem flooded to the surface after I was given this assignment. I was only chosen to write because I’m the last one in the group who hasn’t had a turn. They must have assigned the other characters and given me what was left over. Of course the unimportant writer got the unimportant animals.
I felt like an afterthought. Because that’s what the ox and donkey in the Nativity, in all of Scripture, were to me.
Had you asked me to name the characters of the Nativity, I don’t know that I would have even thought of these animals. I didn’t realize how ubiquitous they were in the stable imagery. I was sure I had never seen them in the scene.
And then they were everywhere.
The very night we received our assignments, I laid my head on my pillow to find a new display of a wooden creche in our neighbor’s yard. The donkey was the only piece directly facing me through the window, highlighted with a spotlight.
The only figure with a discernable shape on the unfinished cross-stitch stocking I had started for our son that year is the ox.
As I unpacked the simple nativity set I inherited from my grandmother the year before, tiny ceramic ox and donkey figurines were the first to be unrolled from the wrinkled tissue paper that kept them safe.
It wasn’t that I had decided to search for Christmas decorations with the ox and donkey on display as a way to inspire my writing. It turns out, they were everywhere, and had always been. I had just failed to notice. And as I prayed with their images in preparation for the assignment, I couldn’t help but wonder who else I regularly failed to notice.
Who in our world, especially around the holidays, is forgotten? Who do I interact with on a regular basis that goes unnoticed? Who is carrying the heavier load, literally and figuratively, and doesn’t receive the thanks and acknowledgment they deserve? Who is glossed over or looked down upon because they aren’t as fancy as angels or magi?
The ox and the donkey are so much more than just animals that happened to be present for the birth of Jesus. In a sense, they are the only ones in Bethlehem that opened their home to the Holy Family. They are the ones who were present as Mary labored and delivered God into our world. And they are the ones who offered their table to cradle the Savior.
May we forever not just remember their existence, but express gratitude for what they offer and the gift that they are. And may we do the same for the overlooked and forgotten in the world today – the ones who can best teach us how to open our homes and our hearts to Emmanuel.