The First Crib

The humble stable is so vital to the Nativity that St Francis re-created the scene in a cave with ox and ass, and paintings of Christ in a manger are among the most enduring of all Renaissance images, observes Caroline Campbell

- Caroline Campbell

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IN modern Britain, Christmas is about the only time when everyone takes a break. Whatever your faith, it has become one of the great moments of the year, associated with family and festivities, as well as over-indulgence and extravagance. It’s sobering how many families scrimp and save through the year to give their children a ‘good Christmas’.

This is all a long way, of course, from the first Christmas. As recounted in the Gospels, it didn’t take place in a king’s palace, a house or even a hovel. Imagine a young woman, heavily pregnant, in an unfamiliar town in the depths of winter, two millennia ago. Abandoned by everyone but her husband, who isn’t the father of her child, no one will give her a pillow on which to lay her weary head. She has to take refuge in a stable and according to the Gospel of Luke, ‘she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn’.

St Luke’s pithy description of the miserable circumstances of Christ’s birth has always been at the heart of the Christmas story. Perhaps we would perceive it differently today, however, if more than a millennium after the event itself, a quite exceptional individual hadn’t attempted literally to re-create the details of this extraordinary episode as it is related in the Gospels.

In December 1223, a holy man, who had devoted his life to the poor and suffering, was invited to spend Christmas with a friend, who lived in a village he had visited since childhood. The host, anxious to please, asked his guest what he could do to make the festivities truly special. The holy man was St Francis and this was the start of one of our most beloved Christmas rituals.