We had one splurge during our trip to the Holy Land last February. While in Bethlehem, we met up with a guy named Odeh, who joined the Church while in England, but is a lifelong resident of Bethlehem. Odeh owns an Olive Wood store in Bethlehem and showed us some of the most impressive hand-carved nativity sets that we saw anywhere during our trip. There seemed like no better place to get a nativity set than Bethlehem (I'm guessing he too realized this) so we couldn’t turn it down.
We were drawn to this particular set because of the hollowed out wood trunk that makes up the manger. We learned that trees are very scarce in Israel (all that are there have been planted) so the default wooden manger that we think of where Christ would have been born would have actually been a cave much like this one below. To this day, many residents of Bethlehem keep their animals in cave mangers under or near their homes. Just one of the tidbits we learned on our trip.
We were drawn to this particular set because of the hollowed out wood trunk that makes up the manger. We learned that trees are very scarce in Israel (all that are there have been planted) so the default wooden manger that we think of where Christ would have been born would have actually been a cave much like this one below. To this day, many residents of Bethlehem keep their animals in cave mangers under or near their homes. Just one of the tidbits we learned on our trip.
1 comment:
This is AWESOME! So beautiful and heart felt.
Post a Comment