THE COMMUNITY TRAVELLING CRIB SET
Early in November Jill Cooke went to the Chestnuts to meet Judith Wigley to talk about Travelling Crib Sets. The idea of travelling crib sets comes from an old Mexican tradition known as Posada.
Posada is an old Mexican tradition where young people dressed as Mary and Joseph travelled from house to house asking for a room for the night and telling people about the imminent arrival of Jesus in the weeks leading up to Christmas. On Christmas Eve they would visit the local church to re-enact the nativity and place figures of Mary and Joseph in a crib.
Modern day Posada uses nativity figures of Mary and Joseph who travel from place to place. This gives each ‘host’ the chance to create their own celebration in their home or place in the community, worshipping and reaching out to their communities with the real message of Christmas, making room for Jesus in their lives.
Judith has been encouraging the parishes in Otley deanery to start schemes in their parishes and had come up with several ideas on how they might be used. One idea which hadn’t been tried was to send a ‘crib set’ on a journey around the local community.
With this in mind Jill visited a number of businesses down Addingham Main Street and asked them to display one of our sets of knitted figures in their windows. Hopefully we can all enjoy watching the nativity figures journey down the village through advent. It should be fun spotting each day where they are resting for the night, as they will not be taking the shortest route to church which will be their final resting place, on Christmas Eve, December 24th.
