Missing: one king, answers to Balthazar. Wandered off last Epiphany with a French peasant girl who had a basket under each arm and an eye for wise men bearing gold and smellies. Could have returned to Babylon, more likely made for Lewisham. We will miss him at our church crib this year. While paintings of Jesus’s birth have been found in early Christian catacombs, the first live Nativity scene is said to have been created 800 years ago next Christmas by St Francis of Assisi as a visual aid for preaching. The idea spread, with statues replacing the living oxen, asses and shepherds. During the French Revolution, when churches were closed, one Jean-Louis Lagnel, an artist from Marseille, made clay figures of the Holy Family and supporting cast so that people could create Nativities at home. He dressed them in Provençal clothes and represented the shepherds as local tradesmen, setting the Christmas story in his community.
A collection of these santons fetched up in south-east London years ago at All Saints, Blackheath, where I am churchwarden, a gift from parishioners who holidayed near Avignon.
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