There is an elderly couple who live on my street, Nonie and Oscar. Every year since they retired
the Christmas Nativity scene they set up on their yard gets more
and more intricate.
The manger features two huge styrofoam snowmen wielding candy canes guard like at the
entrance, once inside the manger the first thing you’ll notice is the unorthodox choice of the
baby Jesus (most depiction’s of christ don’t include a big smiley face and red yarn hair). This is
because the baby Jesus originally included in the nativity set was swiped years ago by some
neiborhood kids who left only his broken plaster penis in his place. So a Strawberry Shortcake
doll has been substituted in the manger, and is doted over by Mary, Joseph, and a plastic
gingerbread man.
Nonie and Oscar got the life-sized plaster figures of Mary, Joseph and the Wise Men on a trip to
Tijuana (I suspect it was a toss-up between these or the little peeing boy birdbath). All the
figures came painted in eye shocking Day-Glo colors. Mary wears an electric blue robe, the wise
men are clad in hot pink, neon
magenta, and psychedelic purple (mercifully these have faded to less vision damaging hues over
the years). One point of contention was the black Wise Man. Originally his face was painted
glossy midnight black with candy apple red lips and bright white skyward rolled eyes. This didn’t
go over well with some of our more politically correct neibors, who threatened to go to the city
council. In protest Oscar painted him lime green with purple lips and he remains that way today.
Because of a lack of room in the mobile home the original manger animals were left of the side of
the interstate. In their place stand a herd of plastic reindeer, a concrete Eeore the donkey (from
Winnie the Pooh) a flock of pink plastic flamingoes, a ceramic toad, and most inexplicably, a large
paper mache’ dinosaur. Last year somebody rearranged two of the plastic reindeer in the “doggy
style” position. Oscar thought it was the funniest thing ever and it took a boot thrown at him by
Nonie to make him change it back.
I’ve counted seven Santa Clauses (most are hollow plastic with light bulbs inside). Three on the
roof of the house, one on top of the manger, one as an unofficial fourth Wise Man, one that
seems to be doing something rude to a garden gnome, and a gyrating motorized electric one
which short circuited in the sprinklers (it used to go “Ho, Ho, Ho!”, now it goes " Heewoorah,
Hwoorah, Heeewoooorah,!!!").
The rest of the lawn is a tangle of blinking, mismatched lights and features a snow man and
woman made out of tumbleweeds stacked three high and spray painted
white.
Ironically, if you were to go out and PURPOSELY try to make the ugliest, tackiest, most garish
Christmas scene on Earth you couldn’t touch this display, and Nonie
and Oscar don’t view all this as tacky in the least.
