News

Fill the room with Christmas crèches

By Joanne Flemming
Compass Correspondent

	POLISH CRECHE: Felice Maciejewski, Library Director at St. Norbert College, with a wood carving from Poland. The nativity scene is one of many she has collected. (Rick Evans photo)

For Felice Maciejewski, director of the St. Norbert College library, De Pere, the Advent/Christmas season begins in mid-November.

That's when she brings her collection of Christmas crèches out from storage and displays them at St. Norbert and in her home.

Unwrapping them piece by piece "gives me that sense of anticipation of the birth of Christ," she said. There is "just that hope and that anticipation. When they are finally all out and people come to look, the looks on their faces bring me great joy."

Maciejewski has around 125 crèches, mainly from Latin America, but also from Africa and Poland. She displays 80-90 of them on the first floor of St. Norbert's Todd Wehr Library through the Epiphany, Jan. 6. She will put others out in her home.

Maciejewski began collecting crèches when she was a high school student in Milwaukee. Her first was a small, wooden Polish crèche with very tall spires, which she found at the Milwaukee International Folk Fair just before Christmas.

"I was really attracted by the colors and the shapes," she said. "I was hooked from there."

Maciejewski said she likes crèches that "are made by artisans. Each reflects the culture, the artisan and the materials that are available to that artisan."

Materials used in their creation include seeds, cloth, corn husks and ceramics. One from Mexico is made from shark's teeth.

Brightly colored, woven cloth was used in one from Guatemala, Maciejewski said. "It looks like the Holy Family sits under a rainbow."

The largest - its figures measure about a foot high - is a ceramic crèche from the Dominican Republic. The smallest comes from Costa Rica, where Maciejewski lived for six years. The figures are very tiny and fit "nice and neatly" inside half a walnut shell.

An Ecuadoran crèche has the most pieces - 25 - from tiny lambs and dogs to poinsettias. It is made from "marzipan, a bread crumb like paste" made from almonds, that is baked and painted. The colors are sealed with acrylic. She said its figures are very small and are hard to display because they don't stand up well.

In her favorite, which comes from Peru, all the figures are wearing "chullos, the woven caps with long flaps over their ears. Even Baby Jesus is wearing a chullo."

Maciejewski said she bought most of her crèches in the United States. Some are gifts from family and friends.

Her favorite places to find them are the shops and marketplace in San Antonio, Texas. When she attends the American Library Association's mid-winter conference in that city, she takes a half day to look for crèches.

One she found is on a Santa Claus, which, when it is flipped over, reveals a Nativity scene. She also has one from Peru that is a crèche inside an egg.

While Maciejewski worked at Tulane University, New Orleans, she had a Costa Rican friend who also collected crèches. That friend displayed her collection in the school's Latin American library. Before she returned to her Central American country, the woman made Maciejewski promise that she would continue the tradition of displaying the crèches and that she would add to her own collection.

Maciejewski said she displayed her crèches for 10 years at Tulane before moving to De Pere, where she has continued the custom.

Maciejewski said there are several crèches she would like, including one from South Africa, iron ones from India and some by artists from New Mexico.

"When I have enough money saved," she laughed. Plus, she would like more display cases so she could put out the whole collection.

"I just look forward to it," Maciejewski said. This is "a beautiful time of the year and a beautiful time in our faith."