Christmas wrappings

"And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn."

Georges de la Tour, in addition to giving us a rare exception to the rule that Mary always wears blue, shows us exactly what a swaddled baby Jesus would have looked like. De la Tour would know, since in France swaddling was still customary well into the 19th century when Rousseau wrote this about it:

"The child has hardly left the mother's womb, it has hardly begun to move and stretch its limbs, when it is given new bonds. It is wrapped in swaddling bands, laid down with its head fixed, its legs stretched out, and its arms by its sides; it is wound round with linen and bandages of all sorts so that it cannot move.”

Rousseau was criticizing the practice of swaddling by lazy French mothers who didn’t want to deal with their children so they would wrap them up and leave them unattended, or better yet, hang them by their swaddling bands to a post on the wall. It’s a good thing modern parenting has eliminated this kind of barbarity.

In Jewish custom, swaddling clothes consisted of fabric cut into long thin bands (the term swaddling comes from swath – the width covered by the single cut of a scythe). The bands would be wrapped around a newborn in order to comfort them and give them proper posture. Sometimes the band would first be worn as a girdle around the belly of the pregnant woman, then used to swaddle the child, then saved for the eventual purpose of wrapping the body for burial. Paintings of Christ as a swaddled infant tend to foreshadow his death by showing him sleeping in a kind of haunting stillness. We are meant to see the relationship between the child “wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger" with the body of Jesus "wrapped in linen, laid in a sepulcher that was hewn in stone."

The next time you are in Aachen, Germany, you can visit the reliquary said to hold the original swaddling clothes of Jesus. The relic is a brownish folded piece of fabric. But you can only see it if your visit coincides with its exposure – once every 7 years for 14 days. So you’d better mark your calendars now for June 2007.

When our children were born (all in the same hospital) (not all at the same time) (or was that obvious?) the nurses would do this tricky blanket wrapping job each time they had temporary possession of the baby. I’d let the nurses take a turn while I ate lunch, and when they returned, they’d hand me a tiny mummy with a face. One nurse told me that every hospital has a different swaddling protocol, and nurses that work at more than one hospital have to know them all. I’ll bet they went to special infant-wrapping camps just for training purposes. But it was all a waste as far as I was concerned, because as soon as the nurses left the room I would unwrap my babies. How else was I supposed to admire their toes?