About five years ago I became pretty irate at the sight of Christmas nativity sets I saw placed in peoples yards. They appeared totally irreverent and seemed to have nothing to do with the Christmas season.
I thought the Christmas message was being dumbed down by people who I'm sure would call themselves Christians through the use of these, so called, nativity sets. I was becoming increasingly annoyed at the site of cartoon characters inside of nativity creches. This seemed to border on sacrilege to me.
I decided I was going to do something about it starting with my own front yard. My wife had asked me a few times if I would make a Christmas nativity set for our front yard and now I had a good reason to do it.
I needed to decide how my nativity would look and where I could get a good reference piece of art to work from. I decided to start collecting Christmas cards that were mailed to us and use the most reverent one. I actually used a combination of cards to achieve the desired Christmas nativity set pose I was looking for.
I wanted our nativity set to be life size and full color. I also wanted Mary, the infant Jesus and His cradle to be one piece for easy storage. I made Joseph a separate stand alone piece, sort of standing guard over Mary and Jesus in a watchful fatherly and protective pose.
I began sketching and re-sketching to achieve the desired likeness and proportionality I was looking for knowing that if it didn't look right at a small scale it would look a lot worse when I enlarged it to life size. Also, my drawing had to scale up to life size and fit properly on a 4 X 8' piece of plywood.
I then made a color sketch that I would use for my guide when I choose paints and actually started hand painting our Christmas nativity set.
I took inventory of any and all tools I had and realized I had all the hand tools I would need to complete this job. The most important and necessary tool was the jigsaw and I just happened to have one but, they're not expensive anyway and I would suggest borrowing any tools you don't have. I'll post a materials and supply list later.
Ok, it's not hard to make your own nativity and there are really nice and reverent Christmas nativity sets you can buy at very reasonable costs. My aim is to give you some instructions as well as highlight some of the quality pre-made nativity sets being sold online.
