Probably the first nude man to appear on this blog.
It's a very exciting creche this year, and manages to eliminate Mary, Joseph and Jesus almost entirely, giving preference to Works of Mercy. Some Works of Mercy are more natural than others: take Burying the Dead for example. (The part of the tableau that portrays Burying the Dead looks something like a scene from Dracula...) If my Great-auntie Moly expires behind the sofa after an overdose of gin, should I leave her there for a few years, or get her buried? (Actually, putting a match to her in the garden would be simplest, what with all that gin inside her...) It's true that explaining in Confession that I still haven't buried my great-aunt could be fairly awkward. But I digress.
At the Vatican Press Office, they keep their clothes on, no matter what Amoris Laetitia says.
Although I thought initially that the nude man was Fr James Martin SJ, and that he was in the nativity scene to publicize his latest theological idea - that Jesus was simply a disciple of John the Baptist - I may be wrong, since he (whoever he is) is apparently there to symbolize Clothing the Naked.
A rejected design for the Vatican Nativity scene.
In the Eccles household, we don't include scenes of explicit nudity, but we go for a traditional, rigid, interpretation of the scene. The only oddity is that we have one extra king, who is the wrong size, but he was given to us by a priest, so that shouldn't be a problem.
We really don't have the heart to sack him.
Let's finish with a couple of Anglican nativity scenes from a collection assembled by Fergus Butler-Gallie.
Sheffield - the tin man from the Wizard of Oz, and his oddly-shaped tinned baby.
St Alban's - hand-knitted Teletubbies.
Correction: even on a blog intended for family reading, there have been scenes of nude men before. See this piece about the Atheists' Nude Calendar and Richard Dawkins's reluctance to participate...
