Advent Calendar Day 18: The Cherry Tree

Over the next month, I'll be offering thoughts on the Nativity set model, a large papercraft crèche that you can find and download here:

https://gumroad.com/l/ThkR

Advent Calendar Day 18: The Cherry Tree

The cherry tree has come to be associated with Christmas through the Cherry Tree carol, a six hundred year-old ballad set during Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem.  In it, Mary, passing under a cherry tree, gets a pregnancy craving for one, and asks Joseph to reach up and grab her one.  Joseph, either doubting her tale of divine conception or not yet having been told of it (both versions exist), tells her that if she wants a cherry so bad then she ought to have the baby daddy get one for her.  At this the cherry tree bends down to allow Mary to pluck a cherry from its branch.  Joseph either then repents of his momentary doubt and spitefulness, or an angel appears and tells Joseph of Mary’s miraculous, dadless pregnancy. 

This story stems from yet another apocryphal infancy gospel, but doesn’t have a Christmas or pre-Christmas setting.  It’s set later, during the flight to Egypt.  Mary’s craving isn’t a natal whim, but a nutritional necessity, and Joseph is upset over his inability to provide the family with food or drink in the desert, their supplies of both exhausted.  The tree, not cherry but date, is called upon by little Jesus to bend down and give them fruit.  Also its roots break the surface and provide plenty of water. 

This is one of the many lil’ Jesus miracles.

The drawing here is, like in the carol, a cherry tree intended for a Christmas setting. I like the idea that the tree, its sentience activated, wished to continue it is worship, and followed them, providing food and shade and standing really still when anyone else was looking.