After supper the next night, Momma and Daddy were sitting in the living room.   I was laying on the rug and coloring a picture of Santa in my Christmas color book that Grandma had given me.

I heard Momma say to Daddy.   "You know what? We need a nativity scene for under the tree."

"Well, you know, we just don't have the money to buy one," Daddy replied.

"I know," Momma said.   Then she clapped her hands and jumped up from her chair.

"I can make one!" she said.

I jumped up from my coloring to watch what Momma was up to.

Momma spread newspapers out on the kitchen table.   Then she got her paint set out of the buffet drawer.   She dug around in the wastebasket and pulled out a couple of empty cereal boxes.   She went into the bedroom closet and got down her bag of material scraps and some pipe stem cleaners.

Momma laid everything out on the kitchen table and thought for a minute.   She cut up the cereal box and painted it to look like wooden shingles.   Then she took pipe stem cleaners and bent them into shapes like people.   She took scraps of material from the bag and made robes to put on the pipe stem cleaners.   They looked just like shepherds!

She took some beautiful blue silky material and turned one of the pipe stem cleaner people into Mary.   She put golden cloth on three pipe stem cleaner people and they looked just like the Wise Men.

"Honey, run to your bedroom and get that little plastic doll we use to tie to the kite." Momma said to me.

Momma took the doll and put a tiny diaper on it and put it into a cradle she had made from match sticks with a little bit of straw in it.

Then Momma opened up the buffet drawer and found some gold foil that she had saved off a candy bar.   She cut out a cardboard star and glued the gold foil on it.

The empty cereal box now looked just like a little barn with the front open.   Momma placed it under the tree and put all the pipe stem cleaner people in the correct places.   Then she hung the gold star on a branch right over the barn. She pulled a white Christmas tree light down behind the star.   It looked like the star was shining!

I thought it was beautiful!

Then Momma really got busy.   I could see she was thinking about more creative decorations for our house.

Momma spread cotton all over the buffet top and it looked just like snow.   She took the empty cereal boxes and made houses out of them.   She cut pictures from the catalog and a couple of magazines and pasted them on the front of the houses--for windows, doors and wreaths.

Momma had a plastic church with a bell and a light in it that her sister had given her and she put that at the end of the street.   I had a plastic whistle shaped like an old fashioned man on a bike and she put that down by the other end of the street.   I also had an organ grinder that was from a broken snow globe and Momma put him under a plastic lamp post that glowed in the dark.

Momma stepped back and looked at her creation.   She got a book down from one of the shelves and put it under part of the cotton at one end and put two little wax deer candles up on that and a couple of plastic pine trees.   It looked just like the deer were looking down on the village.   Under the trees, she placed a small wooden cabin.   She lifted the top off the cabin and put a piece of cone-shaped incense in it.   When she lit the incense, the smoke curled out of the chimney and smelled just like pine wood burning.

In the center of the village, Momma pulled back the cotton and put in a round mirror from a broken looking glass she had.   It looked just like a frozen pond in the center of the village.

I also had small glass statues of Aunt Polly and Grandma Grump, characters from the Tom Sawyer book, and Momma put them by the houses.

It looked just like a real little village.

I thought it was beautiful too!