The Mini Santa-Creche
Knowing my predilection for small but wonderfully tacky nativity scenes, our friend George gave me the item shown in the photo at right.* This little Santa is a shade under 3-inches high, and about 1.5 inches in diameter. The surface texture is slightly fuzzy, in a lightly flocked sort of way.
Where, you might be wondering, is the nativity scene. All will be revealed shortly.
I was delighted with this addition to my collection although, unbeknownst to George, we already had an example of this design in our collection. But there's more coincidence than just that.
We got our little Santa when we first visited Rome in 2001. Someplace in the Trastevere section of the city there is a religious-articles store tucked away down an alley, in a basement, behind the dumpster on the right. It seemed like the next best thing to an "undisclosed location" and I've yet been able to find it again. Neither can I remember the name of the store.
However, I can remember vividly that this store was filled with wondrous things. An entire wall was filled with hundreds of little drawers, the type you might find holding screws and nuts in a basement workshop, and each drawer had medals for one particular saint inside. Other rooms had endless shelves filled with collectors plates with various images on them, icons in all sizes and shapes and–shall we say?–quality, posters, 3-D pictures, postcards, placemats, wrist watches, rosaries of all types, statues large and small, some luridly painted, some plain, some luminescent…. You get the picture. The store was low-ceilinged and cramped but surely had twice the number of goods to be found in my other favorite religious-articles store across the street from S. Maria Maggiore.
In 2001 we found a handfull of these little, flocked fellas on the shelf and we bought every one of them to give on our return to our more discerning friends. Well, it turns out that George, too, bought his in Rome in 2006 when he was part of our tour group. I haven't asked yet whether he found it in the same store where we found ours, or whether there's another source for these marvels that we didn't know about. Suspense awaits resolution!
Anyway, as you may have suspected by now, there is a creche involved with this Santa, and it is to be found in Santa's belly by pulling back on Santa's head, rather in the manner of a Limoges box. In the foreground is the holy family; behind them, a cow and an ass are resting. Santa, quite evidently, is not fat enough for an angel, a shepherd, sheep, nor any wise individuals, but I thought the cow and ass were a nice touch.
Isn't it just too precious!
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* Click to visit my Flickr page and see a larger version.
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Sunday, 4 January 2009 at 19.53
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I believe that *I* was one of your "more discerning friends" who received one of these, for the Our Lady of the Pink Flamingoes Religious
SchlockFolk Art collection. I opened Santa to admire his tummy-contents just last week, when filing a new Infant of Prague among the other artefacts in the OLPF collection. It's wonderful beyond words.on Sunday, 4 January 2009 at 20.50
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Indeed you were. It was a very, very select group. One does like to give mementos to those whom one knows will appreciate them as fully and faaabulously as possible. Is the PFRFA collection documented online yet?