My Magi: Crab, Crocodile and Sea Horse
By MAUREEN DOWD
Okay, Mo - we get it. The last time you were at your brother's was a long time ago, because 17 creches are very difficult to hide. Thus we learn - Maureen Dowd does not have a lot of time to visit her brother. (But, if we watch Charlie Rose, we learn that when she does a bad interview on Late Night TV Talk Show - she gets drunk, goes over to her mother's, who tells her that her legs look great, and then goes over to her sister's, who let's her sleep in the same bed with her. Suggesting that her sister might not be married. Probably just as well she doesn't get drunk and go over to her brother's, she might end up sleeping in HIS bed.)WASHINGTON -- Last Christmas I got a jolt.
I learned that my brother Kevin collects crèches. They were all over his house, onto every mantle, table, counter, lawn and closet — 17 in all, including the modest plastic stable our mom put over the fireplace when we were little.
Probably because you weren't listening. The only time you are likely to have anything to do with him is when "the clan" gathers at Ma Dowd's.
I was perturbed. I knew Kevin, a salesman, was a fanatical guardian of the word Christmas, as opposed to the pagan, generic “holiday,” but I had no idea that he had such a monomaniacal hobby.
Learned all the rules, of a modern day grifter, don't hold on, to nothin' too long. And DO make fun of the "peasants" who CO collect such things. Especially when they are family. And make sure to get in a literary reference, so we will all know how well read you are. Way to Go Mo!
Maybe I was scarred by reading “The Glass Menagerie” as a teenager. But books and records aside, collections always struck me as vaguely creepy. I had shuddered for years as my sister accumulated clowns and Don Quixote objets. And the porcelain baby collection of an older cousin actually made me feel queasy.
Such an excitable boy.
I wondered why Kevin was so obsessive about crèches. Was it a way to stay close to our late mother? An homage to our old church, Nativity?
As a child, he treated St. Joseph, the shepherds and three kings as action figures, staging smack-downs.
Manger mania? MoDo just invented a psychiatric / personality disorder out of thin air. Well, there really wasn't all that much going on worth writing a column this week. I would have to agree. And if there IS a MANGER MANIAC ... then we know who the MANIAC is.
“The shepherd had an advantage because he was holding the lamb, and he could use it as a weapon,” Kevin recalled fondly.
I also remembered that he got very upset one year when St. Joseph was stolen from the outdoor Nativity scene at Nativity, and he fretted over why Christ’s stepfather disappeared from the New Testament so abruptly.
Could that make him hoard a houseful of St. Josephs — and send his three sons to a college named St. Joseph’s?
I was curious enough about the manger mania that when he told me he’d been invited to the Friends of the Creche annual convention in New Haven one weekend in November, I asked if I could go, too.
Are they afflicted by Manger Mania also?
Touring the crèche display at the Knights of Columbus hall, we met collectors who had 300, 500, even 600 crèches, the kind who might put an addition on the house just to display their stables.
Suffers from Creche Envy.
Kevin began to feel inadequate with a mere 15. (He gave two to his oldest son.)
Bonnie Psanenstiel, a heavy-set 52-year-old nurse from Owensboro, Ky., told me that she has more than 500 sets packed into her “Nativity meditation room,” even though “I’m not really into religion.”
Had to get in that Bonnie Psanenstiel is heavy-set. MoDo likes to pick on the less than sleek.
Classic Dowd - got in the perverted sex angle.
She got her first, which was hand-carved out of olive wood, on a high school trip to Morocco and spent four years baby-sitting and cleaning houses to pay it off.
She’s most attached to the set given to her by a woman she helped when she was a rape-incest counseling volunteer. “We used to sit by the Mississippi River and just talk,” Bonnie said as she started to cry. “She would slowly gather up some of this Delta clay, and she made me a set.”
Lest we think of any of the Creche-mongering men as a little light in the loafers. Got in rape and "not homosexiall
She believes Nativities represent “renewal.”
The Rev. Tim Goldrick, the gregarious pastor of St. Nicholas Church in Fall River, Mass., said his grandfather told him it was a Portuguese-Azorian tradition that the man of the house set up the crèche. He begged to put up their Woolworth’s set.
Good. Christians and Jews can play with Creches and not get all IDF on one another.Interesting, the more MoDo writes about these folks, the more sympathetic she becomes. Now, if only her damn brother could give it up ...
For years, the priest kept hundreds of crèches in milk crates in his guest room, which precluded actual guests.
“There was no room in the inn,” he said wryly.
When he transferred from his last parish, he called a mover and explained that he owned no furniture but did have a lot of Christmas decorations. “It took three men two days to box them up and ship them,” he said.
Mike Whalen, 61, of Clinton Township, Mich., the president of the crèche society and proud owner of 400, said he doesn’t know of crèche fixations causing any marital battles. “There’s a lady from California whose husband is Jewish, and he’s very involved,” Mike said. “He came up with an Excel system to organize things.”
It's a damn movement! Creche collectors of the world ... unite !
Rita Bocher of Wynnewood, Pa., does the society’s newsletter. In the ’80s, doing market research for the Franklin Mint, she had to research crèches. “I thought nobody collects Nativities,” she said. “Turned out, I was totally wrong.” Now she has 700 subscribers around the world.
Maureen Dowd: Certified fanatic. With a quirky sense of it.
She saw her favorite in a German museum. It was a prequel, showing the Magi getting ready to go on their trip, ordering around servants, gathering gold, frankincense and myrrh.Father Tim explained to Kevin that Joseph might have disappeared so abruptly all those years ago because of the belief that if you bury a St. Joseph statue in the yard, you can sell your house quicker. (A tradition that has revived with the recession, according to The Wall Street Journal.)
I couldn’t fight the fanatics, so I joined them. I bought a Cape Cod crèche at the convention made by Nathaniel Wordell of South Chatham, Mass. Mary’s a mermaid. The baby Jesus is covered with a striped beach towel. The Wise Men are crab, crocodile and sea horse. The “livestock” are frog, turtle and starfish. Joseph has a trident.
Sadly, it did not draw my brother and me closer. “That is sacrilegious,” Kevin said, staring in horror. “The Virgin Mary does not have a tail.”
Your whole damn post, oh red-bushed one, has wreaked about how not close you are your brother are. 'Tis a shame my dear, because family is what's left when no one else will take you in.
Although you really got him good with your sacreligeous crepe. Which horrified him, because there is something holy and sacred about the creche to him For you, MoDo, just another hit piece you phoned in ... exposing far more of your own petty and vapid self than anything else.
