St. Patrick’s Nativities Display “biggest ever”

Craig Bakay | Dec 11, 2019

While an actual official count of the number of Nativities on display at St. Patrick’s Church last Sunday in Railton may be elusive, suffice it to say there were a lot of them.

“This is the biggest one we’ve ever had,” said Mary Murphy, one of the organizers. “We have a pile of them.”

“There’s more than 600,” said Fr. Bill Steacy. “I counted them.

“They come from all around the world and there’s even one from 1830 that my uncle made.

“Although, I couldn’t tell you where that one is and I might even find it when I get back home today.”

“I think he’s counting the angels in there,” said Murphy. “But we do have a lot of small ones and then there are all the ones from the (four) classes at St. Patrick’s School.

“There’s at least 50 of them alone.”

Murphy’s own collection is more than 100 nativities and they had contributions from other collections as well.

“The Cole Lake crew (who hold 101 Nativities the week before every year) came down and added quite a few,” Murphy said. “This is the first year we’ve had to use the centre table to get everything out.

“There’s so much art in these (and) we even have a couple of doubles — which we seldom do.”

She said they also had contributions from Pauline Hogan, Elizabeth Kellerman and Alice Tippin.

Her favourite though, is a new one that’s not quite finished. The manger is made 150-year-old barn board donated by John and Brenda Lesperance.

“Bill Flynn made it and it’s going outside when it’s done,” she said.

Murphy said although it’s a Catholic Women’s League project, they did have some other help as well.

“We had four high school students who were here for volunteer hours and they were just terrific,” she said. “It’s a CWL project but we had a whole crew.”