THE LOW POST: Nativity Story

This year's offerings, incidentally, are slightly above average. In Canada there is a developing serial crime story involving an enormous nativity scene in Old Montreal, a scene that goes up every year as part of the Fete de Noel. Last year, thieves boosted the baby Jesus; his body was never recovered. This forced the Fete organizers to anchor Jesus to his cradle this year. The precautions were to no avail, however, as of this past weekend bandits had sawed off the legs of several of the wise men at the knees. Now they are still wise, but about 30 percent shorter. Some of the huge fiberglass figures also had their eyes poked out. Joseph's cane was also stolen, pried out of his hands. I am amused by the image of a fiberglass Joseph, eyes completely blank and staring straight ahead, fighting and eventually losing a battle with a living human being to keep hold of his fake cane -- and ultimately left standing there in the dark night, empty hand extended.

Then there is this story in Naples: Thieves made away with over a million Euros worth of figurines from a nativity scene in the Chiesa di San Nicola alla Carita church. Normally nativity thefts with a monetary motive don't really count for me, but this one was interesting because the only figures the thieves left behind were Jesus and a donkey -- apparently because they were worth significantly less than the others. This, to me, is a cheering holiday detail. So is the article I recently read in the Daily Southtown, one of the Chicago Sun-Times papers, which reported that General Foam Plastics, a North Carolina company that makes nativity scenes, has been besieged this year with calls for replacement Jesus dolls. The same story claimed that police in New Jersey found twenty-seven stolen Jesus dolls in the back of a single car. The article, however, was staunchly pro-Jesus. "Christ is the center of our Christmas," it quoted one theft victim as saying. "You can steal him from our porch, but you can't steal him from our hearts."

This, certainly, is one of the downsides to the nativity-desecration phenomenon. Almost every community has one such incident and it almost always makes the town's local newspaper, accompanied by a sad-looking photo of the ravaged nativity, with its empty manger surrounded by a plastic-eyed Joseph and Mary staring blankly ahead in inanimate bereavement. The community subsequently makes a public appeal to the thief, usually a gothed-out teenager who ends up getting caught by a vigilant parent who finds an unexpected bounty while searching for junior's pot stash in his closet. The teen is then dragged by his eyebrow-stud across the street and forced to re-deposit little plastic Jesus in his manger, at which point the newspapers are contacted and the whole ordeal is re-sold to the community as a "Christmas miracle." You may even see this story reported as a "Second Coming." When I become Minister of the Interior in post-revolutionary America, the reporters who write those stories will be fitted with concrete moccasins and sent to work in logging camps in the Alaskan tundra.

Anyway, back to the Left Behind game, which is the first gift I've ever gotten that actually fills me with Holiday Spirit. For those of you who are not familiar with Left Behind, it is an enormously popular Christian book series which depicts an Armageddon scenario in which the true believers are whisked up to heaven at the Second Coming, literally vanishing out of thin air even as they do things like pilot commercial jet-liners, leaving the rest of us amoral nihilists on earth to bathe in our own blood and generally massacre each other. In the video game, the Believers roam a desecrated New York City landscape (it is highly amusing that both al-Qaeda and the makers of Left Behind: Eternal Forces chose to make their masterpiece against a canvas of a burning Manhattan) wasting the forces of the Antichrist, leaving huge piles of bodies everywhere they go. It is hard to imagine a product that better encapsulates, in one package, the spirit of both modern American capitalism and modern American Christianity. If you have a serious gore jones, it's also not a bad video game. The soundtrack (especially the "Street Fight, Main Theme") kicks ass.

Those of you who were not on the original Left Behind mailing list really missed out, as the e-mails the company sent out in anticipation of this video game launch are easily some of the greatest examples of unintentional comedy ever to grace the Internet. From the start, the company asked its customers to assist them with prayer, and as such sent out regular "prayer requests," for instance this letter asking us to pray for a good reception at a Christian retail convention: