Fair Trade Figurines Tell the Nativity Story
Jolanda Malburg was struck by the beauty and joy of the Christmas season as she gazed at the Nativity scenes inside Global Gifts, a CRC-supported, fair trade business in West Michigan.
Malburg, training coordinator for Faith Alive Christian Resources, saw shepherds made of woven banana leaves from Uganda; Peruvian painted-clay wise men; sheep made of smooth-sanded olive wood from the strife-torn West Bank; a tiny stable scene carved from an Ecuadorian tago nut, and pastel-colored crocheted finger puppets from Vietnam.
These items—so subtly and yet colorfully handcrafted—reminded her of similar figures made many years ago by her mother. “My mother’s Nativity figures were made of simple felt and stuffed with cotton. They sat on an end table where baby Jesus was close enough to touch,” she recalls.
Her mother’s carefully created figures, and those sitting on the shelves at Global Gifts, says Malburg, tell the story that amazing story, she says, “of God walking among us, becoming one of us.”
Yet another thing that she thought that day at Global Gifts, she says, is of other ways in which this transformative story is told—especially to young people.
“Week after week in Sunday school we tell awe-inspiring stories of a mighty, sovereign God who is the great creator, provider, and promise keeper,” she says. “At Christmas these stories find their balance in the small face of the baby lying in a manger.”
And helping to tell this story to children are Walk With Me resources, and especially the Christmas curriculum, that are put out by Faith Alive. Walk With Me is a set of materials that offer a Reformed/Presbyterian interpretation of Scripture for young people in churches.
“We draw kids into this powerful truth with Walk With Me. We gather them around a manger to peek in at a Savior who came to dwell with the kids who sit still like little figurines and the ones who run circles around frayed teachers,” she says.
Global Gifts is a church sponsored fair-trade store in West Michigan. If you’d like to see some of the nativity sets described above, you can view the Ten Thousand Villages catalog online at www.tenthousandvillages.com. Just type “nativity” in the search field.
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