The Christmas creche, or Nativity scene, is one of my favorite components of our celebration of Christ’s birth. At home, we have several scenes in all shapes and sizes—ornate Italian ceramics, large-scale figures for table-top use, sets adapted for children with Peanuts characters and Fisher Price Little People.  

We rotate them from year to year, but my personal favorite is the set my wife and I bought at the Ansley Mall Hallmark store the first year we were married. Like any responsible newlywed, my wife insisted the set was too expensive. We drove all over Atlanta looking for a more affordable creche. Half a tank of gas later, we returned to Ansley to buy the set we had first seen. I still cherish it, though I display it somewhat out of view. 

Like several of our neighbors, we have a vintage illuminated outdoor scene too. Our Protestant friends include the baby Jesus in their scenes all December; we don’t put him out until Christmas Eve. 

Within a few miles of my house in historic Marietta, I can access at least three “living” Nativity scenes at Evangelical churches. While most of the year these congregations would shun any lavish visual representation of Christianity, in December one of the churches even constructs a stable and Bethlehem barnyard.  

One of several nativity scenes at the Cathedral of Christ the King is pictured during the 2023 Christmas season. Photo by Tim Durski

From the Vatican to the Baptist Church on the corner, Christians love Nativity scenes because they make visible and tangible an awesome mystery. For a moment, before a Christmas creche, we are caught up in both innocence and profundity. 

It makes sense, then, that the Nativity has always been a favorite topic of poets. John Milton, who could never adequately address the Crucifixion, made up for that shortcoming in his massive “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” a long poem that I’ve never quite cared for, perhaps because it unfairly characterizes the shepherds as “silly.” Still, Milton’s poem seems to monopolize the subject, unless you look harder. 

I remember making my own Nativity scenes as a child, assembling all the figures and animals from various playsets. In that same spirit, I’ve put together here a sort of Nativity scene in poetry, featuring five modern poems—some well-known, some not—that all feature a key figure or aspect of the traditional Christmas creche. All the poems are easy to find online; I hope you discover at least a couple that you like or that you don’t know. 

Starting with the Holy Family 

I’ll begin setting the scene with the key figures in the narrative—the Holy Family of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus. The poem in which they appear is Wendell Berry’s “Remembering That It Happened Once,” one of the most evocative modern depictions of the Nativity I know. Berry is an ecumenical farmer, philosopher, and writer whose poetry is particularly effective for its plaintive wisdom and observation.  

Berry structures the poem as though we are viewing a Nativity scene; in doing so, “We ourselves, opening a stall, might find them breathing there.” He describes the “Child bedded in straw, /The mother kneeling over Him, /The husband standing in belief/He scarcely can believe, in light/That lights them from no source we see.” The description of St. Joseph’s reaction is exactly as I have always imagined him. Later in the poem, Berry unites our gaze with that of the Holy Family, describing us “Looking into another world/That is this world/ … Sighted as not before, our place/Holy, although we knew it not.” In a short poem, Berry captures how art allows us to see the holiness inherent in our own ordinary lives. 

Milton might have cast the shepherds as “silly,” but most of us recognize them as endowed with the unique grace to heed and honor mystery. I chose two poems to represent the shepherds, Richard Bauckham’s “Song of the Shepherds” and David Bottoms’ “The Boy Shepherds’ Simile.”  Bauckham is an English Anglican theologian and a poet; Bottoms was the former Poet Laureate of Georgia. 

In “Song of the Shepherds,” the shepherds describe themselves as “being familiar with the night,” yet after their journey into Bethlehem “The night was ominously black. /The stars were silent as the sheep.” Years go by, and “night after night” the musicians among them pipe “an earthly echo of the song that banished dark,” a song that “has stayed with us.” The poem beautifully depicts how the Incarnation instantly changed everything yet also evokes a sense of ongoing transformation. Without telling us, Bauckham reveals that out of the deepest darkness, Christ brings enduring illumination. 

Bottoms’ poem is a small masterpiece; a poised balance between sentimentality and truth that is instantly relatable and memorable. The poem is written from the perspective of the boy shepherds in a living Nativity at a Baptist Church. The stage includes a real cow, goats from a nearby farm, and an old dog. The baby is “not a child or a king, /but Mary Sosebee’s Christmas doll of a year ago.” And yet, Bottoms writes, “since believing was an easy thing/we believed it was like a child, /a king who lived in the stories we were told. For this we shivered in adoration. /We bore the cold.”  

One of my Godparents, Bill Sessions, insisted that Bottoms had written the poem for him. I don’t know if this is true, but Bill certainly liked the poem very much, for it dispenses with reason, logic, or argument and simply embraces belief. I like the pun in the last line with “bore,” meaning not only to endure, but to penetrate or to dispense with tedious quarrel. 

A full Nativity scene needs wise men, or Magi, and for our purposes they can really come from no other text than the Anglo-Catholic T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi.” This poem is one of Eliot’s best “shorter” works and is one of his “Ariel Poems” from 1927, the same year as his conversion. In many ways the poem is about a person, in this case one of the Magi, who is undergoing the process of discernment and catechesis necessary for conversion. The poem works on both literal and symbolic levels. In the literal, the world is “hostile, unfriendly, dirty, and folly.” In the symbolic, Eliot condenses allusions from the entire Christian story into one stanza with images as striking as “three trees on the low sky,” “hands dicing for pieces of silver,” and “feet kicking empty wine-skins.”   

At the conclusion of the poem, Eliot’s Magi are left much like Bauckham’s shepherds, convinced that they have witnessed a miracle, yet still grappling with how to understand it. Both adult responses to the Nativity are beautifully contrasted in our Nativity scene with the pure innocence of the boy shepherds. 

A sense of the celestial 

Innocence brings us to our final piece of the creche, the animals, who in Thomas Hardy’s wonderful “The Oxen” are endowed on Christmas Eve with a sense of the supernatural or celestial. Southwest English mythology holds that on Christmas Eve, all the animals kneel in adoration of the infant Jesus. The poem begins with a memory of the speaker’s childhood: “Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. /’Now they are all on their knees,’/An elder said.” And for the children, “Nor did it occur to one of us there/To doubt they were kneeling then.” 

Hardy admits that in the anxious and alienated modern world, few people would believe this old superstition. The speaker of the poem, however, wants to believe: “Yet, I feel, /If someone said on Christmas Eve, /‘Come see the oxen kneel,’ … /I should go with him in the gloom, /Hoping it might be so.” 

Hardy was one of the prototypical modern poets. Unlike our other poets, Hardy could never embrace Christianity as an adult. Yet his creation of an imaginary landscape, Wessex, and some of his greatest poems such as “The Darkling Thrush” reveal a man who wanted to believe.  

Perhaps at Christmas it is fitting that a skeptic like Hardy rounds out our creche, for Christmas more than any other season compels us to cast off doubt and despair and find, in a crude and simple manger, the living light of the world. I know of few better places to discover that truth than in poetry, and I hope that you discover here something you too can pass along. Merry Christmas!