Religion: The Rich Poverty ...

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Up the hill through olive groves, past herds of goat and sheep, come the worshipers on Christmas Eve to the quiet Judean town. Peasants walk to Bethlehem wearing medieval costumes, silk-hatted diplomats swirl into Manger Square in black limousines. And in entering the Church of the Nativity, all bend low to pass through the tiny door called The Needle's Eye.

Inside, Roman Catholic Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Alberto Gori carries an olive-wood Christ child, accompanied by priests and deacons with swinging censers, acolytes and choir boys with long, flickering candles. The procession makes its way down into the Cave of the Nativity beneath the church, and there the figure of the Child is laid on a heap of straw in the place where tradition says the manger stood.

This swaddled image lying in the damp, cramped cavern where Jesus may actually have been born is the center and model of numberless Nativity scenes all over the world. Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox or sectarian, there are crèches today almost everywhere there are Christians. There are Nativities as sumptuous as the presepio (manger) in Rome's 11th century Church of Ara Coeli (Altar of Heaven) on Capitoline Hill, with its Christ child—legendarily carved by St. Luke himself—so bedecked with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls and gold that its form is barely discernible and the surplus treasure has to be kept in a safe behind the altar. And there are homemade Nativities like the tiny Krippe (crib) found two years ago by a traveler in the Soviet Zone of Germany—a worn and tired-looking peasant Virgin watched by a tattered Joseph and two miners in blue overalls.

In the Jungle. There are mechanical crèches, including that of the local St. Vincent de Paul Society in Beirut, Lebanon, which is 35 ft. by 23 ft., with foot-high Wise Men, shepherds, animals moving in opposite directions against a papier-mâché background of Judea. Overhead, the Star of Bethlehem and angels wheel through the sky, real rain falls, water turns a mill wheel, and on a silken coverlet a Christ child (wired for six volts) raises his head and opens his blue eyes.

There are cheap cardboard crèches, turned out by the thousands in busy factories, and there are others whose making is a joyful family tradition; one Madrid family lives in an apartment so small that their crèche completely fills it; they haul it up to the ceiling and sleep beneath. There are crèches in churches, in public squares, even in bars—a notable one is located in the English Bar in Nazareth.