On Saturday I went to Clevedon Baptist Church to sketch at ‘Destination Bethlehem’ for the Christmas card we’ll send out at work. I work at the West of England Baptist Association and we’re trying to feature a different one of our churches each Christmas. Destination Bethlehem was a magnificent immersive nativity experience – and a complete sell-out, I believe. Guests lucky enough to get a ticket, and also a large number of school children during the week, were taken through a labyrinth of Nativity story sets, and had the opportunity to bake real bread, be shouted at by Herod, chat with some Bristolian shepherds, haggle in a Bethlehem market, and finally meet the baby in the manger. I got to put on a costume, crouch in the corner on the way to the stable, and draw what I saw.

My drawing reminds me a little bit of Helen Oxenbury’s illustrations in We’re going on a bear hunt. I so much wanted to draw like Helen Oxenbury when I was fourteen, and I never will, but perhaps it’s the colours in this, or the way they’re all moving gently and hesitantly towards the baby they know is the culmination of their quest.

My reading of the Bear Hunt story (which will be an animated special on Channel 4 this Christmas) was always that the family wanted a fun adventure together with lots of actions  but that it preferably wouldn’t involve an actual live bear. We see the bear herself at the end, lonely in the moonlight, unable to play with the family who came to seek her. Bears, after all, are real, and they’re not exactly safe.

The baby in my picture is, of course, a plastic doll. I think Christians are probably very accustomed to play-acting. We do it all the time.  But however much we act makes no difference at all to whether the person represented by the doll, Emmanuel, God-with-us, is actually real, and actually with us.