Thursday - Rub-A-Dub Jesus
Dec. 22nd, 2005 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninanevermoreToday on the drive into to work, I was thinking of a Rub-A-Dub Dolly that I have in a closet, wrapped in swaddling clothing.
When I was 14, the youth group at my Methodist church decided to stage a live Nativity scene. It wasn't a fancy one with live animals or anything like that. Expectations for realism in Nativity scenes were lower in the 80's. Ours had painted plywood cutouts in the shapes of two sheep and a cow, and about a dozen teenagers of various ages wrapped in bathrobes and colored bedsheets standing around awkwardly playing the parts of Joseph, Mary, a pair of angels, three Magi, and a few shepherds.
I was Mary, and since I was Mary I had to come up with a Baby Jesus to put in the manger so we all weren't sitting around a box full of straw with nothing on top of it.
I went through my dolls that I had outgrown no so many years before, and decided that Rub-A-Dub Dolly was in the best shape and about size of a real baby. Besides, she was waterproof, which would come in handy should it start to rain.
I showed her to my mother and asked if we had a blanket that I could wrap her in to disguise the fact that Baby Jesus was being played by a blond-haired, female baby doll.
"Let's wrap her the way Jesus would have been wrapped," she told me.
My mother was one of those mothers who believed in using every opportunity to teach. She read all of the time, and due to her incessant curiosity about the world, knew a lot about a lot of things. If any of her children happened to ask a question that she didn't know the answer to, she would look up the answer with us. We had a set of Collier's encyclopedias on the bookshelves purchased in 1969, the year I was born, that was referenced at least once a week for something. Hours of my childhood were spent laying on my stomach on the living room floor with a dictionary, encyclopedia or atlas spread out before me, searching for answers to questions I sometimes wouldn't have asked if I had known it was going to lead to this much research.
When my oldest brother was born in 1960, my parents were living in Benghazi, Libya, where my father's engineering job had taken them. Libya was at that time owned and operated by the British, before they completely gave up on the business of running empires. My mother showed me how their Libyan maid/nanny had swaddled my brother when they brought him home, the way Libyan babies were swaddled by their mothers.
She took an old white bedsheet and cut it into strips about an inch wide. She began wrapping the doll from its feet up to it's shoulders, tightly.
I was skeptical. "She looks like a mummy," I told my mother.
"That's how they wrap babies in the Middle East. Things aren't much different today there than they were 2000 years ago. This is how Mary would have wrapped Jesus when he was first born," she told me.
Who the heck would wrap their baby up like a mummy? It seemed silly to me. I didn't want to hurt my mother's feeling by unwrapping the doll after she had gone to so much trouble. I found a fuzzy blue blanket to wrap the doll in on top of the swaddling, because I knew my peers would never believe what my mother had told me.
After Christmas was over and the Nativity scene was dismantled, I tossed my Rub-A-Dub Jesus back into the closet, still swaddled, and forgot about it.
That year was my last Christmas with my mother. The following October, she lost her battle with cancer.
I found the doll in the back of my years later, still wrapped snug and peaceful in swaddling clothing. I had dozens of baby dolls growing up. Most of them I sold in garage sales or donated to charities over the years, but I can't part with this one. She has traveled with me from my father's house to various apartments to the house my husband I bought two years ago.
Last night I was watching a show about the Christmas Nativity, and at one part they showed how a baby in ancient Israel would have been swaddled. A woman in the program took strips of white cloth, about an inch wide, and wrapped an infant in them from feet to shoulders.
My mother was right. That was exactly how the baby Jesus would have been swaddled.
When I was 14, the youth group at my Methodist church decided to stage a live Nativity scene. It wasn't a fancy one with live animals or anything like that. Expectations for realism in Nativity scenes were lower in the 80's. Ours had painted plywood cutouts in the shapes of two sheep and a cow, and about a dozen teenagers of various ages wrapped in bathrobes and colored bedsheets standing around awkwardly playing the parts of Joseph, Mary, a pair of angels, three Magi, and a few shepherds.
I was Mary, and since I was Mary I had to come up with a Baby Jesus to put in the manger so we all weren't sitting around a box full of straw with nothing on top of it.
I went through my dolls that I had outgrown no so many years before, and decided that Rub-A-Dub Dolly was in the best shape and about size of a real baby. Besides, she was waterproof, which would come in handy should it start to rain.
I showed her to my mother and asked if we had a blanket that I could wrap her in to disguise the fact that Baby Jesus was being played by a blond-haired, female baby doll.
"Let's wrap her the way Jesus would have been wrapped," she told me.
My mother was one of those mothers who believed in using every opportunity to teach. She read all of the time, and due to her incessant curiosity about the world, knew a lot about a lot of things. If any of her children happened to ask a question that she didn't know the answer to, she would look up the answer with us. We had a set of Collier's encyclopedias on the bookshelves purchased in 1969, the year I was born, that was referenced at least once a week for something. Hours of my childhood were spent laying on my stomach on the living room floor with a dictionary, encyclopedia or atlas spread out before me, searching for answers to questions I sometimes wouldn't have asked if I had known it was going to lead to this much research.
When my oldest brother was born in 1960, my parents were living in Benghazi, Libya, where my father's engineering job had taken them. Libya was at that time owned and operated by the British, before they completely gave up on the business of running empires. My mother showed me how their Libyan maid/nanny had swaddled my brother when they brought him home, the way Libyan babies were swaddled by their mothers.
She took an old white bedsheet and cut it into strips about an inch wide. She began wrapping the doll from its feet up to it's shoulders, tightly.
I was skeptical. "She looks like a mummy," I told my mother.
"That's how they wrap babies in the Middle East. Things aren't much different today there than they were 2000 years ago. This is how Mary would have wrapped Jesus when he was first born," she told me.
Who the heck would wrap their baby up like a mummy? It seemed silly to me. I didn't want to hurt my mother's feeling by unwrapping the doll after she had gone to so much trouble. I found a fuzzy blue blanket to wrap the doll in on top of the swaddling, because I knew my peers would never believe what my mother had told me.
After Christmas was over and the Nativity scene was dismantled, I tossed my Rub-A-Dub Jesus back into the closet, still swaddled, and forgot about it.
That year was my last Christmas with my mother. The following October, she lost her battle with cancer.
I found the doll in the back of my years later, still wrapped snug and peaceful in swaddling clothing. I had dozens of baby dolls growing up. Most of them I sold in garage sales or donated to charities over the years, but I can't part with this one. She has traveled with me from my father's house to various apartments to the house my husband I bought two years ago.
Last night I was watching a show about the Christmas Nativity, and at one part they showed how a baby in ancient Israel would have been swaddled. A woman in the program took strips of white cloth, about an inch wide, and wrapped an infant in them from feet to shoulders.
My mother was right. That was exactly how the baby Jesus would have been swaddled.
