How the Nativity Went Down

I've made another one of these. My excuse was a stay with a family of friends who have two little kids, hence a reason to take a gift like this. I will admit that as time went on and I committed to the project, I became unsure about the family's attitude to the religious angle on the subject matter, since religion had never come up. Then I realised that it didn't really matter - if they weren't happy about it, well, it didn't actually have to be a Christmas Crib, it could happily be populated by a set of Moomin figures or something like that. (As ever, click on a picture to see them at a better size)

My basic approach is to take the time to build up the structure with stripwood, ie. to give it a vaguely more realistic feel than you usually get, what with the vertical planking. But I've taken to trying to light them up with simple LED circuits. Before now, that's meant making 19C-looking lamps, not authentic in any way but with a sort of old time feel. With this one, I decided to see whether I could fabricate a flickering fire feature. Although you can't see the flickering, you can see above that I just about managed it. The wires, neatly connected by my amateur soldering iron, go in a channel through the base to the fire, from what I can pretend is the woodshed out on the right. See the switch and the battery connector, suitable for a 9V battery or a 3xAA battery clip = 4.5V.

If 9V seems a bit strong, there are two LEDs under the blazing logs. It's interesting about voltage. At first, I worried far too much about what resistors to use. Too much voltage will lead to a very short life for LEDs. But with battery circuits you often don't need resistors, especially if brightness isn't a concern. These ones were advertised as not needing them, on the assumption that batteries were used, and 3-5V was recommended per LED. However, I did want the fire to light up the Holy Family (or Moomins), if the room lights were off or similar circumstance, hence my use of two LEDs. What I didn't know was how bright the 'fire' would be once I'd painted it. That's why I gave them the 4.5V clip as well. Some friends thought it looked better with the lower voltage, which I think you can see in the slightly unfocused picture above.

You can also just about see a black-and-white cat lazing on the beam up on the left, and a tiny brown blob on the beam on the right, which is a mouse. No, they didn't come with the Holy Family, I just thought they should be there. There's another little rodent barely visible down in the left hand corner.

So, the general layout has a main space front and centre, designed to make it seem not too weird to have this large campfire 'indoors', to be filled with the approximately 1:32 scale figures. There's a smaller space, more roughly walled, clearly to shelter the animals. That has a flat roof, which is my solution for the problem of where to put the angel. And there's snow. Snow is not actually unheard of in Bethlehem, but it was also appropriate for a gift going to Finland.

The fire itself took a lot of pondering. Even if you had a real fire, it wouldn't look realistic at this scale. You can probably see that it's meant to look like a pyramid or cone of vertically stacked logs. The 'logs' were cut from lengths of transparent plastic sprue left from old plastic model kits. I applied orangey shades of clear acrylic, and then black and pale grey, cautiously at first until it was obvious that the leds were bright enough to shine through a fair amount of paint. I'm pretty satisfied with the result, and would happily try the same technique again and maybe make it even more effective. Spend more time whittling away at the logs, see if I can't make them look more natural.

Anyway, the young customers for this scene weren't criticising anything, I'm happy say. But the security people at Manchester Airport had a few opinions to offer. You'll probably think me rather naive, but I had hoped I wouldn't have to undo the whole thing. So I did it up in a pretty wrapper, because kids like unwrapping things, and for a 'bit of a laugh', put the scene inside a box for a Black and Decker belt sander. For the impact, you see, of apparently giving small children a somewhat inappropriate present. Here in the pic you see the best I could do to cover it up, after the security people had deemed it necessary to examine this object with a mysterious arrangement of battery and wires. Yes, I know now. Never mind. I had to suffer a very long delay. Not that they appeared to think I was actually carrying a dangerous object. I gambled on wrapping it up only because I knew I'd be going to stay with my generous hosts straightaway on arrival.

The kids were much exercised with arranging the figures as it suited them... Remember the scenes up above? That's how you'd lay out the scene, right? Holy Family around the fire, kings and shepherd in attendance, cow, donkey and lamb off to one side... Well, here's how the kids decided the Nativity went down. Forget all the space round the fire, everyone has to pile in with the animals. My favourite part is what they've done with the angel. He/she is tipped forward, lying down so he/she can look down on the scene too...