Feast of the Nativity                                                                

Now I can say I know a little bit about how Mary must have felt, watching something new get itself born that first Christmas. I have just led another group of writers, gathered in a library meeting room, toward a new place inside themselves.

Each one has chosen a brown paper lunch sack. Each sack has something different inside. I ask for closed eyes and open minds as they reach inside tentatively to explore. I study expressions and feel the anticipation peppered with apprehension. Gradually the sacks close and are laid aside, the hands move to the pens, the pens flow across paper.

The night before the workshop, after I spent the evening making up the sacks, I dreamed it was Christmas Eve and I worked at a restaurant where all the customers were a new kind of family—one I had chosen.

The man-half of the couple who ran this place (his name was “Red”) always entertained the clientele with his songs, delivered from a small wooden stage built into the corner of the main room. I heard him tell the guy who usually accompanied him, “There will be a new Red singing tonight.”

He meant me. And I wondered how I could do both—sing and serve, entertain and wait on tables. But oh, how I wanted to try!

Then I went outside to catch my breath before the place filled up with the steam of full plates and the laughter that rises from full bellies. It was snowing, like it’s supposed to do on Christmas Eve, and the light bulb of a moon was already bouncing down starlight to earth, filtered through the lampshades of the heavy cloud cover. The effect was to

make every feature of the outdoors luminous and crisp, even in the dark, which is just how I wanted to sing.

A postman finishing up holiday deliveries waved at me from across the street. “C’mon in,” I said and gestured toward the door. “Eat. Get warm.”

“Can I bring my bear?” he asked.

“Sure, why not?” I said, and a shapeless black pelt as tall as my shoulders, though it moved on all fours, lumbered up onto the porch and through the doors. A fox followed at his heels, and a wolf brought up the rear, both canid tongues wagging, both pair of nostrils flared as they picked up the scent of dinner.

It seemed to me a new sort of manger scene, and I knew then I could do that sing-and-serve thing that had worried me, that this “new Red” had found a family and the real meaning of Christmas.

“Feast of the Nativity” found its start in an Amherst-style workshop held at Glendale Branch Library, Oct. 5, 2008.

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