A Pig in a Manger

My grandmother never had much in the way of material goods, but that didn't seem to bother her.  Her principal concerns in life were family and faith, and anything else seemed a matter of indifference to her. This presented my parents with a dilemma every Christmas:  what do you get for a woman who has very little, and wants even less?  This preoccupied them year after year as they did their Christmas shopping - until the Year of the Bell. 

 That year, they happened upon a small and very pretty crystal bell in a gift shop in Huntington, West Virginia, and decided that maybe grandma would be interested in the piece for its sheer beauty.

 It was a hit.  Grandma loved the bell, and bragged about it to everyone she knew, both inside and outside of the family.  She talked about it so much that everyone decided she had a fascination with bells.  So people began to buy them for her.  Whenever family or friends were in any shop that sold bells, and had a few extra dollars, we bought one and sent it on.  Over the years they accumulated, and eventually she had a collection of several hundred, in all shapes and sizes, of every imaginable composition and design.  When she died, the bells constituted just about all of her estate.

 The bell collection started a custom in the extended family that continues to this day.  Someone decides that you are destined to collect items of a particular type, and from then on, items of that type arrive from time to time whether you want them or not.  Some members of the family have immense collections of things that were gathered in this way, and really have no idea what to do with them.  But of course they can't be refused:  that would be rude. 

 How Aunt Sally decided it was Mom's destiny to collect nativity scenes is unknown, but one Christmas when I was very small, the first one arrived, and they have arrived like clockwork every year since.  Unlike some of the family, however, Mom found her collection delightful.  I guess it was because she likes Christmas so much.  Every year she decorates the house with these things.  Any more, it's hard to find places to set all of them out.  They were created in every imaginable medium.  There are wood nativity scenes, glass nativity scenes, porcelain nativity scenes, tiny ones, large ones, painted ones, carved ones, modern ones, classic ones, comic ones . . . I have no idea how many.

 But the one I remember the best is the one with the pig.  One Christmas several years ago it arrived, carved out of cedar.  There were the usual Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus figures, and the wise men and shepherds, and an angel and a cow and a donkey and a sheep - and a pig.

 When Mom opened the box and laid the pieces out on the table for everyone to look at, there was dead silence for a while, much, I suspect, like the shocked silence in Revelation 8:1 -  and perhaps for similar reasons.  This wasn't just an oddity, it was an act of sacrilege.  None of us had ever heard of such a thing. We all knew that no first-century Jewish stable would have housed a pig.  Never.  We all looked at each other, uncertain what to say.  Normally we would have expressed our delighted admiration for the lovely gift.  But we just could not bring ourselves to do it.  A pig?  A pig?  In a nativity scene?  It just didn't compute.

 Dad finally broke the silence, singing softly, "A pig in a manger, along with the sheep . . ."  to the tune of Away in a Manger.  We all giggled until Mom stopped him with a cold stare.  He sat back, but just couldn't help himself, and began again, "While swineherds slopped their hogs by night . . ."  to the tune of While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night.

 Mom stared at him again, then broke out laughing. "Aunt Sally has really outdone herself this year," she said.  "This is truly a one-of-a-kind gift."

 The silence now broken, we all launched into a discussion of what to do about this aberration.  Everyone discounted out of hand the idea that it was some sort of joke - as I've noted elsewhere, Aunt Sally lacked the bizarre sense of humor everyone else in her family had.

 I was convinced we should just quietly put it away in the back of a closet, up high, perhaps to be discovered in the distant future by some pagan archeologist who didn't know any better.  Perhaps, I thought, the archeologist would develop a theory about a pig-worshipping variant of Christianity popular in the late twentieth century.  But Dad commented that wood doesn't last well in the long term, and there probably wouldn't be more than a few fragments for the archeologists to discover.  Probably not enough to recognize that this was a manger scene, or that it included a pig.

 My sister suggested burning it, but the rest of us loudly protested.  The gift was kindly meant, and Aunt Sally also knew better than to think a pig should be in a nativity scene.  Probably, she just hadn't looked too closely at the thing.  To burn it would be to reject the present, and in some sense to also reject Aunt Sally.  That, to our family, was also sacrilege. 

 My brother suggested we call Aunt Sally and tell her about the problem. Everyone immediately rejected this idea.  If we mentioned the problem to Aunt Sally, she would be mortified, and her feelings would be hurt.  We couldn't let that happen. Besides, part of the Christmas ethic is that you never, ever, complain about a gift.

 Mom rejected all of these ideas.  There was nothing wrong in general with the nativity scene, she said, other than that it included a forbidden animal.  She suggested we just display the nativity scene, sans pig. 

 But Dad was of the opinion that we should display it, all of it, proudly every year.  "We have the rare opportunity," he said, "to make a major advance in the Christmas tradition.  How many families get a chance to add something totally novel to the season?"  Then, as a light came on in his eyes, "Just think of the swine carols we can invent!"

 "There already is one, you know," Mom answered.  "The Boar's-Head Carol."  When we all regarded her with blank looks, she softly sang, " . . . The boar's head, as I understand/Is the rarest dish of all this land . . ."

 "That's a real song?" I asked.

 "Indeed it is," Mom answered.  "Apparently, at one time people thought cooking and eating a boar's head was just a marvelous way to celebrate Christmas."

 "Ewww," my sister said.

 I was all for adding a roasted boar's head to the annual family Christmas observance. That would have been a truly unique family Christmas tradition!  But no one else seemed much interested in the idea, especially after Mom pointed out that it would mean she and my sister would celebrate Christmas elsewhere every year. I withdrew the suggestion.

 "Since there's a precedent," Dad  said, "we would be well-advised to honor it.  I doubt we can get a boar's head to roast every Christmas, but at least we can give this one little pig an honored place during the season.  And in the process, we can right an ancient injustice:  the pig, after all, is the one animal always excluded from the Christmas celebration."

 Any novel event was grist for the family humor mill.  My brother, who had apparently been thinking ahead, began the game with a swine carol of his own: 

"Ham hocks roasting on an open fire,

Bacon dripping in the pan,

Santa puffing on his ugly old briar,

And swilling beer from a can . . ."

"Not bad," Dad said.  "But I'm sure someone can do better."

 My sister, who liked the softer, childlike carols, tried:

"O little sow of Bethlehem,

How sad you are tonight,

Ejected from the manger scene,

How can you bear this slight?"

"I've always been partial to The Friendly Beasts," said Mom, as she began her entry in the competition:

"I", said the pig, all fat and pink

"They chased me away, because I stink.

They chased me away, and didn't blink,

"I," said the pig, all fat and pink.

While the others were sharing their entries into the swine carol competition, I was thinking furiously, sorting through the various carols I knew, trying to find a way to fit them with words associated with pigs.  This turned out to be remarkably difficult.  I could pretty easily manage the first line, but after that it was hard to come up with a second and third line that made sense and worked well with the general sense of the carol.  I tried:

    "Jingle bells, bacon smells . . ."

And realized it was derivative of a popular childish parody of Jingle Bells.  Then I tried:

    "Have yourself a merry little pig roast . . ."

Always a popular idea in Kentucky, but I couldn't come up with a second line that made any sense at all.  By this point the others were looking at me expectantly.  They all knew I liked to make up songs, and I knew they expected me to come up with a particularly stunning parody of some carol or other.

 I was really sweating it out, until an idea came to me:  most Christmas carols are rather repetitive, consisting of a number of lines endlessly repeated, with a few new lines added as the carol progresses.  And of all the repetitive carols in the world, there was one that outshone all the others.  I began, at first a bit hesitantly, then gained confidence as the rhythm of the thing began to build:

"Aunt Sally's gift arrived by post

On Christmas day, on Christmas day;

Aunt Sally's gift arrived by post

On Christmas day in the morning.

And what was in the box, you ask?

On Christmas day, on Christmas day?

And what was in the box, you ask?

On Christmas day in the morning?

The Virgin Mary and Christ were there,

On Christmas day, on Christmas day;

The Virgin Mary and Christ were there,

On Christmas day in the morning.

The shepherds all were in the box,

On Christmas day, on Christmas day;

The shepherds all were in the box,

On Christmas day in the morning.

And all the cows and sheep were there,

On Christmas day, on Christmas day;

And all the cows and sheep were there,

On Christmas day in the morning.

But what a shock! So was a pig,

A pig was in the Christmas box!

It was a shock!  There was a pig

In a manger scene that morning!

My mother swooned, and Dad just laughed,

To see that pig in the manger scene;

We all were taken by surprise

On Christmas day in the morning."

The family erupted in applause.

 Every year since, the cedar manger scene has been prominently displayed on top of the china cabinet in the living room, with the pig placed carefully in front, to make sure no one misses it.  It has become a treasured family Christmas tradition.  Singing swine carols has not, for some reason.