Hello, everyone.
           Well, what a year! Mary and I have been up to our neck in it! The carpentry trade has been booming like never before, and I have had commissions from all over the place - even Egypt! Oh, and we have had a baby, if you hadn't heard, called Jesus. Well, when I say “we” have had a baby, perhaps that's not quite accurate...
            Maybe I should start at the beginning. Last year, as you know, Mary and I got married and we were settling down quite happily at Nazareth. I had set up a small carpenter's shop in the back of the house, and although Mary had talked about taking a job and getting out of the house a bit, I wasn't sorry that she hadn't, because she wasn't always very well, especially in the mornings.
            It was me that usually got out in the mornings, down to the timber yard to look over what they had got, order a few bits and bobs, get some nails, that sort of thing. Then I'd go back home and get on with work. Well, this particular day, I came back before lunch and Mary said she had had a visitor when I was out, a gentleman caller. This sometimes happened when people wanted carpentry jobs doing, so I asked if he left an order. 'No', she said, 'he said I was going to have a baby'.
            Well, it seemed a bit odd, a total stranger coming in and saying something like this, so I asked if it was the doctor, and she said no, he was more like an angel from on high. Furthermore, he had told her that the father of the baby was going to be God, and it was then that I realised that Mary must be under some strain, because she was talking such rubbish, so we did get the doctor in, and he said she was going to have a baby, so that bit was true, and I asked him if he knew who the father was going to be, and he looked at me rather oddly and said it wasn't a doctor's job to identify the father, and if I didn't know, he didn't know.
            Well! I thought I'd keep quiet after that, and as far as I was concerned, it WAS my baby anyway, so I just got on with things, and Mary got bigger, and when they use the expression “big with child”, they really know what they are talking about! I got cracking with my side of the business, i.e. I started making a nice little cot out of some cedarwood I had left over - it's a hard timber to work, but lasts for ever, so if we have lots more children it'll come in useful! - and then came the blasted decree from Caesar Augustus!
            Well, I don't need to tell you about that decree - everyone was mucked about by it, not just us - but having to go off to Bethlehem in December, just when the baby was due, that was a killer, and of course there was no accommodation anywhere and we ended up roughing it in a stable, not much of a stable at that, the manger was all broken and cracked, so I had a go at mending it and when the innkeeper saw it, he said he would accept doing the job instead of paying for accommodation. The thing about these mangers is, they've got a long pole which runs right along the front, and if it's positioned badly, the oxen and asses lean on it at the wrong angle and it quite often breaks - still, Mary says I always go on too much about the details of my jobs and no-one's interested, so I'll leave it there!
            Anyway, then the baby was born, and after that we went to Egypt and then got back to normal...
            Oops! Mary's been reading this over my shoulder, and says: Tell them a little more about the baby IF you don't mind, and a bit less carpentry!
            So I'll start another sheet.
            Which we can bring you tomorrow.
And here it is:
            ‘It wasn't too bad an inn stable, as inn stables go even though we were sometimes woken in the night by the lowing of the asses and the oxen. The camels were fine. I have nothing against camels. And it was just as well I had mended the manger with some old sycamore planks that had been lying around because it came in very useful as a sort of table top for having a baby! Mary, bless her, is very uncomplaining about putting up with things, and although we had duly registered under Caesar Augustus's decree, I felt we shouldn't push on back to Nazareth before the baby was born, as she was ever so big with child by now, huge, I would say.
            One night, in the stable, when we couldn't sleep, because of some great star shining into our eyes through a hole in the roof and keeping us awake, I tried to entertain her with some light conversation.
            ‘So, who do you think the father is?’ I said to her, not in a challenging way, more in a chatty kind of way, because she had this bee in her bonnet that it was going to be the son of God, and I had this bee in my bonnet that it was going to be my baby. We all know that when women are going to have babies, they get funny ideas. And at least I would rather be told that the real father was God, rather than Simeon the fishmonger or Philip the camel-driver.
            ‘I am sure it is God,’ she said.
            And I was just about to say ‘And my mother's the Queen of Sheba,’ when a strange thing happened. The door opened, and three wise men came in. And they said: ‘We have been following the star. Is this where the son of God has been born? And Mary said: ‘No, not yet, but very soon.’ And they said: ‘Righty ho, we will be back in a jiffy.’ And after that things started to happen in quick succession - Mary had the baby, the asses and the oxen went on lowing, the camels slept throughout, the heavens shone in glory all around, some shepherds came and made a hell of a mess, and then who do you think came dancing in ?
            That's right.
            The inn-keeper.
            ‘I'm sorry, Joseph,’ he said, ‘but the people in the inn are complaining about the noise in the stable. They can't get to sleep what with all the shepherds and foreign visitors and God knows what. Can't you keep it down?  I'd hate to have to ask you to move on, especially as I hear you're quite well off for gold, myrrh, etc nowadays...’
            Typical of inn-keepers, isn't it? Obsequious when you've got money, contemptuous when you haven't, and distressingly undecided what to do when they don't know what you've got.  Anyway, we used the gold to move out to a proper room and then the angel of the Lord came to tell us to move to Egypt till things blew over...
            People who have never been visited by an angel often ask me: ‘What is it like when an angel of the Lord comes and tells you what to do? What do they look like? Are they very bossy? Or quite friendly?’
            It's hard to say, really. They just speak to you very softly and you know you have got to do what they say. Bit like a mother-in-law, really. No, I didn't mean that. All I know is that you don't argue with an angel of the Lord. You don't even answer back. I once asked an angel if Jesus was really the son of God and he gave me such a LOOK, blank and steely, that I never asked again....
            Egypt was all right. They're not great carpenters there. So I got a lot of work. Then we came back. Now we've settled down again and Jesus is doing very well at secondary school, which isn't bad for a one-year-old baby. His teacher called me in the other day and said, "We can't get over Jesus. He's a one-year-old baby. Yet he's passed all the exams that fifteen-year-olds take. Not only that, but he's cleverer than all the teachers. He's a divine child.’
            ‘Divine? You don't know the half of it,’ I told her.
            So there we are. We have a really clever boy on our hands. Mary wants the boy Jesus to go to university. I want him to follow me into the carpenter's shop. What does Jesus want? He says he wants to save the world and die for our sins. What do I say? I say, teenagers, what do they know? Especially as he's a one-year-old teenager...
             There is much more along the same lines. I'll bring you some next Christmas, if I remember.
The Independent Dec 23 & 24 2002