The True Meaning of Christmas 

Shirley Squires collects and displays Nativity scenes in her Guilford home. Every year since moving here I’ve seen a newspaper article to that effect, including a number to call if you want a tour. This year, I called. 

Wow. 

The tour starts in her garage, which one of her sons finished with floor-to-ceiling shelves. When visitors come over, she turns on the heater and gets all the lights switched on. Already overstimulated, you then go into the house. Every surface is covered: bed, sink, half the stairs.

Her best guess is that there are about 1,400 sets altogether. She stopped numbering them about 1,100. Most of the ones in the garage stay up all year, but the house gets set up starting in September. Although there were a couple strands of lights that had conked out, the display was in overall great condition… not a speck of dust or a cobweb to be seen.

The sets range in size from super-tiny (a whole Nativity inside a Christmas ornament) to tabletop size, and there’s a lot of variation in the number of ancillary people and animals. They come from an estimated 50 countries. They’re made of everything from plaster to porcelain to plastic, wool, tin, stone, glass, more. Some are reverent, others silly (the Chicken-tivity wins a prize). There’s only one in the whole collection where Joseph is holding the Baby. Some of the sets are probably worth a fair bit of money, but she seemed equally pleased with some of the ones that came from the dollar store.

Clearly there’s a point where a hobby gets out of control, where focus and dedication clicks over into obsession, where an old person starts to lose it. The amazing part about 85-year-old Mrs. Squires and her collection is that she hasn’t reached that point and doesn’t seem to be heading in that direction. Would I dedicate my house to my Nativity collection, or any collection? No, not for me. But, there wasn’t anything the least bit creepy about this whole experience. She’s a lovely woman, proud of her family, many of whom are close by, proud of the memories attached to the sets given to her by her many friends and by the many people she’s helped in her decades of volunteer work for the AIDS project, the local hospice, and other causes. She loves Christmas and she loves the Nativity story and she loves these little figurines, and she’s happy to share, and it seemed like it was about as simple as that. In that simplicity I got as close a glimpse of the true meaning of Christmas as I’m ever likely to have.