Leopards in the Nativity

The best thing about Mexico City this year was the Nativity scenes. The big difference between the scenes I saw there and the ones I grew up seeing in the Midwest is the maverick disregard of scale and continuity:

Check out that huge Mary and Joseph and those tiny Magi. It seems wrong to put such care into the setting (check out the path of the Magi and the bushes and the trees) and so little care into the relational scale of the characters.

My wife, who's smarter than me, likened this phenomenon to the parable of the leopards in the temple--wherein a pack of wild leopards so regularly stormed a temple in the midst of a ceremony that the temple people decided to make the leopard storming part of the ceremony. In the process, a thing that should be considered a violation of the ceremony (i.e., leopards breaking into a temple or Nativity figures that don't match) becomes part of the ceremony. The parable is Kafka's and therefore it's anyone's guess what it means. Morris Dickstein, possibly my favorite literary critic, used the parable as the title of a book about the way "outsiders" have become central to American fiction writing.

As I see it, two things happen when we make leopards part of our ceremonies: (1) we make the ceremonies more responsive to the way things really are and (2) we make the leopards less of a threat to the sanctity of the ceremonies.

The bold scale discontinuity that I admired in Mexico City Nativity scenes probably started out as a violation of Nativity-scene construction, something that made the scenes seem obviously "wrong." But this discontinuity gradually became a distinguishing feature of Nativity scenes in Mexico City, and I dare say that it's now their raison d'être. Indeed, it's made Nativity scene viewing quite the spectator sport:

And, it's introduced into the otherwise exclusive world of nativity scene figurines such priceless and diverse characters as these:

lounging desert shepherd! and (my new favorite) disappointed Satan!: