It's Fontanini Season
The perfect nativity set for the end of the world
McSweeney's Internet Tendency, the blog extension of Dave Eggers’ publishing company that is easily The Most Mid-to-Late-2000s Website of All Time1, had one piece in 2009 that remains the most famous output from the site. It's Colin Nissan's “It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers,” motherfuckers:
“I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.”
The obvious joke, which was decently executed in 2009 but feels kind of stale in 2023, is that the narrator is talking about a pleasant and innocuous decorative activity but using a lot of swear words. Regular readers of G.O.T.H.S. know the two things that I try to avoid at all costs: swear words, and extended references to 2000s pop culture. But I can't help it, I have to say it: it's mother fucking Fontanini season.
The House of Fontanini - from the Italian for “ayyy lookada little-a fountain” - was founded in 1908 by Emanuele “Ayyy Bippidy Boopidy” Fontanini, remains a private enterprise of Fontanini's great-grandchildren today, and is maybe Italy's most well-known producer of nativity sets and figurines. Fontanini figurines are five inches tall and made out of polymer, so two of the selling points are obvious right away: Fontanini figurines are nearly impossible to break - after the nuclear holocaust kills us all, the roaches can still use the figurines to set up their own nativity sets - and they are too big for anyone to choke on them. This, of course, makes a Fontanini nativity set the ideal one to have in a home with young children, and my home's got two of those.
So I've got a Fontanini set. We put it up every year at this time and my oldest will sit with it and make the pieces talk to each other and bang them around for hours. I have 28 pieces in my set, which I keep tracked on a spreadsheet to make sure I don't accidentally buy a duplicate; to maintain proper alphabetical order while staying true to the full names on the Fontanini boxes, one of the line items on my spreadsheet reads “Horse, The”. My wife and I went to Disney World over Christmas 2016, and one of the Fontaninis - he’s a great-grandchild of the original Emanuele, but his name also happens to be Emanuele “Ayy Bippidy Boopidy” Fontanini - was actually at the Italy pavilion at EPCOT signing pieces. Obviously I bought one. And got his signature. And got a photo with him. Please note that this photo was taken seven years ago and I had been wearing a hat all day and walking around Disney’s largest park by square footage and I look like shit and have glasses that don’t work well with my face shape and am wearing a t-shirt that references a specific episode of the early-2000s Adult Swim series Tom Goes to the Mayor and that perhaps for the reasons I just provided, my wife requested that I crop her out of the photo for this piece:
Now, I just said I had a 28-piece set, but the Magi were all in one box together, so technically I have 30 pieces. Except Mary, Joseph, and Jesus all came in one box together with the stable and an angel and a sheep, so technically I have 34 pieces. And we add 2 to it every Christmas: one given as a gift to my oldest daughter and one given as a gift to my youngest. And that gets tracked on the spreadsheet, too, because some day they're going to move out, and when they do, they're going to take a clutch of Fontanini figurines with them to start their own nativity set in their own home. Because that's what happened to me.
See, my mom also did this for me and my sister; she added to her considerably large Fontanini nativity set every Christmas by buying each of us a figurine, and then we took those figurines with us when we each moved out, and started our own nativity sets. The process was complicated somewhat by my mom's tendency to always buy a male figurine for me and a female figurines for my sister, so the two of us eventually had to trade a good chunk of ours with each other so I wouldn't be stuck with an all-dude nativity scene in my first apartment. This is what it looks like right now:
So obviously, we’ve got more than just Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus. In fact, Baby Jesus isn’t even there yet because it’s not Christmas and that’s honestly for the best as the Christ child is, ironically, the only actual choking hazard in the set. The Magi are out of the box, although I have, of course, placed them on the opposite end of the room as they have not yet reached Bethlehem. But who is everyone else? Well, the shepherds of course, and various townspeople, and a few angels and animals, and yeah, none of them actually look like they would have lived in first-century Palestine and actually all of them kind of look, well, Italian. But here’s the thing: those other figurines aren’t just “the shepherds”. You don’t just buy a reasonably priced $26 figure of “Shepherd”. That’s Isaac, and Kenan, and Matthias, and Keturah, and Melia, and Obed, and Mary’s Donkey. New characters are introduced every year, and every character comes with a “story card” explaining who they are, and what their family is like, and what they happened to be doing on the night that the King of the Universe was born in a filthy barn to a couple of poor people.
I do not know these stories particularly well. You probably don’t care very much about the backstory of the fifth shepherd in your nativity set. But I’ll tell you who absolutely cares about it: my five-year-old daughter who spends all of Advent coming up with things for these guys (and now gals) to do. She has, in fact, invented her own multilayered backstories for each figurine, and explained to me multiple times who is related to who and what they’re thinking about and why they’re carrying a sheep or a duck or a basket of vegetables near the stable. And when the new figurines arrive at Christmas, she’s going to slot them right in and tie them to the existing stories and build out her mental canon even further, and with each new piece added to the Fontanini nativity set, something new starts, and nothing ever ends. The manger is empty right now, but every polymer resin human being there on my shelf has a name and a story and is critically important to the story, just as critically important as every other polymer resin human being next to it. And that’s what my daughter learns and thinks about while she waits for the child to appear in the manger.
This is, obviously, not a novel lesson. Of course we are supposed to encounter everyone no matter how lowly, of course we are supposed to hear their stories, of course we are supposed to care about them and weigh them with tremendous importance because each lowly person is made in the image of the creator. You don’t need a profound religious experience to piece this together, you can also figure it out by watching A Charlie Brown Christmas. But the Fontanini set is what gives my daughter the ability to grasp this intuitively and immediately. The most important figure in the entire set is whichever one she has happened to pick up at that particular moment. That villager is right there. She has a name and a story and she is important. She's not the main character but we still have to care about her. And we're not the main characters but we are still cared for. In fact, there's only one main character and He's not even here yet, so all we've got is the rest of us.
Immediately before Advent begins, we celebrate Christ the King, and this year we happened to read the famous description of the final judgment in Matthew's Gospel. I have written about this passage multiple times, you likely already know how much importance I place on it, and you likely place a great deal of importance on it as well. But Catholics aren't the only ones who read this passage on this specific weekend: Lutheran pastor and My Substack Pal Benjamin Dueholm, whose writing is always sharp and moving and excellent, compiled some of his earlier notes for homilies on this reading, and captured the immediacy of the final judgment, the judgment that isn’t ‘final’ in the sense that it will happen at the end of time, but rather is happening right now:
“…the story isn’t even a judgment. The judgment is already happening. The choices that the peoples of the nations are making right now will be the choices that determine eternity, and they do not know it. The hungry are being fed or left hungry right now. The thirsty are being given access to water or not right now. The foreigners are being invited in or turned away, the naked are being sheltered from the cold or left to bear it, the sick are being cared for or left on their own, the prisoners are being succored or they are languishing right now, because of decisions that people are already making. And the King of heaven and earth from before the foundation of the world is among them in his people and the nations of the world do not know it…we can try plugging any rationalization or any argument that we would give for these decisions into this story and see how they sound. Think about what we hear—or even what we say—when we see the basic duty of generosity and solidarity with another human life being denied. They didn’t work for it. They did something wrong. It was a personal choice. They are responsible for their own problems. It’s just not realistic. Imagine those words being said to Christ the King on his throne of glory. Said to him, about him. How will those words sound?”
It is telling that at the final judgment, the King of the Universe doesn't say “you did a good thing for a poor person, and so, now, for purposes of this final judgment I am about to make, I will treat you as though you did the same thing to me.” That is how I have tended to approach this passage in the past, and I don't think I'm alone in that. But Dueholm is digging into something very real here: what the King of the Universe actually says is that the judgment already happened. We haven’t just arrived at the end of the world, we missed the last exit a long time ago. We already treated Him, literally Him, the way we did, even though it didn't look like He was there at all. The condemned don't offer an excuse for their behavior that Jesus then rejects; rather, Jesus explains how they were judged by directly laying out when they were judged. The multitudes in the story hoped to serve the King with their lives, and learned, when finally faced with Him directly, that they had either already done it or had already lost the plot completely, and that, instead of finding the King-lookin’ guy and doing whatever he said, instead of finding the “right person” to serve or take care of or welcome, they had already responded to the people placed directly in front of them, and that was what mattered.
The reason I’m talking about the end of the world in the context of my nativity set is not just because my nativity figurines are made of polymer resin so resilient that Severian the Torturer will discover them among the ruins of Nessus in an as-yet unwritten Gene Wolfe sequel. Advent is always the season where we talk about the end of the world. The Gospel reading for the first Sunday of Advent, regardless of the year, is always Jesus describing the end of the world and how it will come unexpectedly. The Gospel readings for the second and third Sundays are always John the Baptist saying “you guys better get it together, I’m pretty sure the world as we know it is about to end”. The fourth week, the readings vary depending on the year, but if you happen to be reading Matthew, the same evangelist who gave us that famous description of the final judgment, you will get Matthew’s interpretation of the Christmas story, and it’s a fascinating interpretation after three straight weeks of “the world is gonna end you better get ready”. Most of the popular elements of the Christmas story - full inn, manger, shepherds, angel appears to Mary, glory to God in the highest, the things Linus tells to Charlie Brown, most everything that informs what goes into a nativity set - do not appear in Matthew’s Gospel, they come from Luke2. The climax of Matthew’s nativity story is is not the heavenly chorus celebrating the birth, but rather an angel appearing before that birth and speaking to Joseph, who has just learned that Mary has become pregnant apparently out of wedlock, and that her reputation is basically going to be destroyed, and his will be too if he moved forward with his plans to marry her. It's a damn shame that they can't get married now, but she didn’t work for it. She did something wrong. It was her personal choice. She is responsible for her own problems. It’s just not realistic.
The first words of the angel to Joseph are “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home”. Again, the series of Advent readings in the lectionary is “world's ending this is important”, “world's ending this is important”, “world's ending this is important”, and then “do not be afraid to take the scared girl into your home”. That's what you get instead of an inn or an angelic chorus or lowing cattle. The story of Christmas, as told by the same evangelist who warns us about the final judgment, is one of hospitality for the unwanted, the unwanted who literally bear God within themselves. And the story of the end of the world is similarly one of hospitality for the unwanted. In both cases, excuses and fear and indecision get burned away by divinity. “But why are they unwanted” doesn’t matter. “But what’s going to happen if I welcome them” not important. “But what if they don’t deserve any help” who cares. Are you going to do it or not? We live in a time where it is not hard to find suffering people. They're in front of you right now. They're unwanted right now. The final judgment is happening right now. That's the main character in front of you right now. Well, there's only one main character, and He's not here yet, so all we have is the rest of us.
Earlier this year, I went to a reading group with some like-minded Catholics who were just so tired of all the bullshit that we had gotten used to from the church's leadership. “Disappointed” wasn't even the right word for it, because disappointment suggests that we expect something better from the people who run the church, and we don't, we're way past disappointment and closer to something like exhaustion. But we all still cared about being Catholic for some reason, and I tried to articulate in that meeting, as best I could, what it was I still cared about. What I fumbled through then, and what I have more time to articulate now, was this: my faith, in the last few years, has narrowed significantly. Lifetime of Catholic education, retreats and sacraments and countless books and writing academic papers of widely varying quality and a marriage and two baptisms and playing music in like 800 different liturgical groups and paying attention to Catholic media and following church politics, and most of the time I’m sick of dealing with all of the stupid bullshit, but I can at least do something for the person right in front of me. That's what my faith has narrowed down to: there is a person in front of me and I have to encounter them and choose how to respond to them. Sometimes that person in front of me is someone I know, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes they ask me directly for help, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they are clean and housed and not in tremendous pain, and sometimes that isn't the case. But whoever ends up in front of me, I had better think about how I want to encounter them and how I want to respond to them and how I'm going to demonstrate hospitality for the unwanted. I had better take that seriously. I had better make sure I’m noticing when they’re right in front of me. I had better surround myself with people who will teach me how to respond the right way. Because I barely understand my faith and am just stumbling through Catholicism as a member of this stupid broken church, but I understand that I can at least respond to the person in front of me. I can narrow my view to the mere end of the world. Even if the manger looks empty, even if the person in front of me doesn't look like the King of the Universe, I can at least do this; I'm not good at it, but I'm better than I was, and I will get better still. In terms of Catholicism, it’s all I have. It’s the villagers, each with their own stories, gathered around the still-empty manger. It's the new person placed in front of me as something new starts and nothing ever ends. It’s the people who have each been given a name, who can’t be broken no matter how hard the world tries, who will still be there at the end of the world. It’s the final judgment happening today. It’s Advent, and it’s Fontanini season.
The Most Early-to-Mid-2000s Website of All Time is Homestar Runner.
The one major exception is the Magi; Matthew's is the only Gospel to mention them.