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BETHLEHEM Local couple celebrates the reason for the season with nativity tradition Story and Photos by Lizz Daniels
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ativity scenes are a time-honored tradition when it comes to the Christmas season. Memories of setting up tiny figurines to honor the birth of Jesus are a shared memory for many Christians, but for Bob and Candee Paredes, it’s about more than memories. It’s about family heritage. Growing up in Mexico, Bob and his siblings didn’t have much, but they did have an aunt who found a way to make Christmas memorable despite their hardships. “She was really good at making the nativity scene because she used paper,” said Bob. “I remember the waterfall and the angel hair and stuff. So what she’d say is ‘we’re going to go to the market and you guys can pick one figure and we’ll use it.’ I remember doing it two years, I was seven or eight years old. And it got to be a thing that we looked forward to. Every year, we would wait to see how she would make the nativity scene. When my son was born, I thought it might be a good idea if he learned that tradition because we never knew about Santa Claus. Everything was nativity. Santa Claus didn’t bring presents to us, baby Jesus did. So when I told her (Candee) about it, she said okay, we’ll start collecting.” Candee’s enthusiasm quickly grew into an an-
nual celebration of Christ’s birth that now dominates their family living room during the holidays in a sprawling display of the city of Bethlehem, complete with lighting, rivers, animals, and angels atop every building. “It’s my fault is what he’s saying, I guess,” said Candee. “I got the little nativity scene that everybody gets that’s the little manger that has the Holy Family and some shepherds, maybe some wise men and some critters. And then, he decided that we needed to kind of think about doing the nativity in the manner that he was raised with doing because he’s from Mexico. Where he grew up, his aunt would do a nativity scene and they didn’t have a lot of money, so his mom who was working in the United States would send money back and the aunt would give each of the kids –– there were four of them –– a little bit of money, and they’d go down to the market and buy some piece that she would add into the nativity and each year it increased in size because that’s what they did. And not just me, other people decided that this is what he needed to have, so I even had to make a list that we kept on the computer that I could print off for people, so that they wouldn’t duplicate. So it got out of hand.”
