This is a brief (and only very slightly exaggerated) recounting of a somewhat unusual, albeit festive, holiday tradition observed for many years by my somewhat unusual, albeit festive, North Carolina family.
by Mary I. Woodell
When we were growing up, in Carrboro, North Carolina, our favorite holiday pastime was always “Hide-The-Baby-Jesus.” Nowadays, we argue over who invented it. Though we can’t remember who it was that first hid the Baby Jesus, the who of it doesn’t matter quite as much as the how.
The Baby Jesus in question was made by our mother, the ceramics artiste. He was the focal point of a full-blown Nativity scene, also rendered in ceramics by means of special molds into which Mother poured what looked and smelled like wet cement. My brother once spent an entire afternoon with one of those molds, populating our neighbor’s yard with mud sheep.
Mother’s Baby Jesus was about the size and shape of your average June bug. He lay flat on his back in his little contoured manger, surrounded by the usual cast of characters. Thanks to their creator’s unfailing aesthetic sense, the sheep, Holy Family, and all three Wise Men were just as white as the day is long. The whole business was spread out over the entertainment console, covered with enough pine needles to hide a hamster. This provided atmosphere, if not authenticity.
It’s conceivable that the true origin of “Hide-The-Baby-Jesus” can be traced to the observation that the Baby Jesus was exactly the same size as the second lambie from the right. This theory is altogether sound, in that we were at the time of an age when identification of spatial analogy qualifies as a bona fide coup. It is further borne out by our collective certainty that the first round of “Hide-The-Baby-Jesus” involved a deft substitution of sheep for savior.
It was several days, at least, before the switch was discovered. Mother was dusting at the time, a pastime of which she’d always seemed disproportionately fond. In fact, she brought to all the varied tasks of housecleaning a fervor and a single-mindedness you don’t generally see outside of evangelicals or soldiers of fortune. Our Daddy was once heard to say that if she’d ever taken it into her head to get as frisky with him as she did with her dust cloth, he’d have died a wore-out happy man 15 years since. (This notion so captivated all of us that most of Carrboro caught wind of it inside a week.)
As I was saying, Mother was dusting at the time. For folks who don’t know her, it bears explaining that Mother is a woman of many truly remarkable qualities. Prime among them is a voice whose upper registers on a clear day can be discerned only by coon dogs, and which has been rumored to disconnect long-distance telephone connections.
It was those same upper registers that told us the deed had been discovered. “Where in the hell is my Baby Jesus?!”
We had to think fast. With lightning-like collective reasoning — the kind you see in jackals and cornered anarchists — we achieved accord.
“He is risen, Mother,” my brother said. “He is not here.”
There was something eerie about how my brother could turn Mother into a wild-woman. He had this talent from birth, maybe even before. Years later, Mother confided to me her conviction that the Sputnik launch had, in some meaningful way, interfered with his gestation. It’s as good an explanation as any, and it may serve to show why it was that all hell broke loose when he said that.
My sister recalls Mother blowing up like a hop-toad and working up to a crescendo of escalating threats, the finale being, “I’m own tell your Daddy.”
True to form, my brother’s memory is detached from the incident. Whilst all this hooping and hollering was going on, he says our half-uncle, Deward, called on the phone looking for his leg. It bears mention that both the circumstances and, more important, the extent of our uncle’s wartime divestiture were shrouded in dark legend, hence his appellation. Be that as it was, his second wife had taken to stashing his prosthesis when she didn’t want him fishing, and he thought we might know its whereabouts. My brother recollects suggesting the compost heap and getting cussed.
My own remembrance focuses on the rapid-fire interrogation, combined with a sweep-search of the living room with Mother fuming, “All right, damn it, where is he? Where’d y’all hide my Baby Jesus?”
Now it happens that this was a good question. Until that moment, I don’t think any one of us had been thinking quite along those lines. More to the point, none of us knew the answer.
If my brother’s role in the domestic body politic was that of lightning rod, my own was more along the lines of the responsible opposing viewpoint. I had a knack, so to say. All eyes were on me as Mother’s question lay quivering in the air.
“It’s a game, Mother. We’ve hid the Baby Jesus, and you have to find him.”
“Shut your mouth,” she said.
“No, no, Mother. It’s an old Norwegian custom. They hide the Baby Jesus, and on Christmas Eve, the person who finds him gets a present.”
We held our breath as she teetered.
“You’re telling a story.”
It was at this crucial point in the negotiations that my sister’s specialty was brought to bear. She was the reliable witness and, thus, the final authority. She carried clout and used it judiciously — like when your tail end was really on the line. “No, Mother, it’s true. We read about it in social studies.”
The credence Mother laid to matters educational was a wondrous thing. Our exploitation of her faith was general and bald-faced, largely because it worked. So it was that “Hide-The-Baby-Jesus” achieved legitimacy.
Truth be told, it was touch-and-go that first year, since we had to find him before Mother did. We also had to convince her that the sheep in the manger was part of the Norwegian mystique — no easy matter. But we felt it was a crucial element because there was something entrancing about the Holy Family and whatnot adoring a plaster sheep, something that set the imagination afire and the cosmos areel.
Mother didn’t see it quite that way. She claimed the sight of that sheep made her nervous, what with his little legs waving in the breeze like he was dead. She kept trying to set him back with the shepherd, only to find the sheep away in the manger as soon as she showed her back.
Meanwhile, the Baby Jesus himself turned up safe and sound under the couch. Thanks to Mother’s vigilance, he wasn’t even dusty. We decided that more of a challenge was called for, and laid him in the fish tank, behind the ceramic deep-sea diver.
This marked the first of what would become an annual tradition of finding increasingly creative temporary resting places for the Baby Jesus. He passed one Advent frozen solid in a party ice tray. Another time, he appeared at Mother’s bridge club, suspended with the shrimp and little marshmallows in her signature lime Jell-O mold. And then there was the banner year when the Baby Jesus got planted head down in a jar of Cheez Whiz.
The fish tank would remain the archetype and the sentimental favorite, though, and it had Mother bolluxed for quite some time — in fact, right up til Christmas Eve, by which time the sheer suspense of it all had become well-nigh unbearable.
It was late in the afternoon — tiny snowflakes (rare and very special in Carrboro) signaling the onset of the magic night, our aluminum tree a symphony in blue and silver, the scent of Christmas Karo syrup heavy in the air — when she took it into her head to Windex the fish tank. Then she let out a yawp that drew our daddy running.
He’d been stalking a family of possums that lived under the porch with one of those mean, medieval-looking slingshots (the kind that braces on your forearm). We’d all chipped in and bought it for his birthday, and his latest leisure-time pursuit was laying waste to the marsupials.
As luck would have it, Mother’s outburst spoiled the first clean shot he’d had all afternoon. This did nothing to improve his disposition, particularly when he ascertained the precise nature of her complaint.
In the heat of the moment, Mother forgot all about the Norwegians and their Christmas customs. She poked around the colored gravel, cussing up a storm and fishing for the Baby Jesus with the little salvage net she’d made out of old nylons and a coat hanger.
Daddy, in his ire, fired a middling-sized rock bull’s-eye into the nativity scene, causing all kinds of disarray. The offending imposter lambie bounced unharmed into the harvest-gold shag, while ivorine shards of various Magi hit the plantstand across the room. This may have been what really set Mother wailing.
My brother claims the vibrato threw his lazy eye out of kilter, probably an exaggeration. Our little family stood frozen in space and time, a gripping mise-en-scene I will carry to my grave. Daddy, with his slingshot slack to his side; my brother and sister, crouched beside the console; myself, hunkered down amidst a wasteland of erstwhile Wise Men. And in the middle, commanding all eyes, Mother, with her dripping Baby Jesus held aloft in a blessedly mute j’accuse tableau.
She scanned us with furious eyes. She was magnificent in her wrath. Mother waited until all of us were just about to bust before she smiled.
“All right, y’all. Now where’s my present?” And suddenly, it was Christmas in Carrboro.
Thus commenced a noble tradition, one that persists to this day. We are long since scattered all over the map. But we always come home to Carrboro for Christmas, in spirit if not in flesh. And either way, even (or maybe especially) for Christmas 2020, we always hide the Baby Jesus. It’s an old Norwegian custom.
Mary I. Woodell is a recognized expert in crisis management, a career in which her upbringing has proven a powerful asset. Her commentary on this and other topics has appeared in The New York Times, Director’s Monthly, Management Review, The Los Angeles Times, Solar Energy, The Washington Post, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
