LEGO Nativities: Tiny Tidings of Great Joy

Best of BrickNerd — Article originally published December 25, 2021.

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you have a merry holiday no matter how you celebrate it—or even if you celebrate it at all. We at BrickNerd are from many faiths and traditions. We speak dozens of languages and represent even more countries. It is that diversity that really brings the richness of culture and breadth of LEGO knowledge that has made BrickNerd such a community the past year.

To me and for many Christians, Christmas is more than just a day of gift-giving and family get-togethers. It is the day we celebrate the feast of the birth of Jesus Christ—one of our most sacred Holy Days. Throughout the ages, many people have celebrated this holiday through expressions of art, music, and literature—religious art is part of the human experience as it is a lasting chronicle of history. As such, many artists throughout the ages have tried to capture the scenes surrounding the birth of Christ as depicted in the Gospels of Mathew and Luke in the Bible. LEGO artists are no exception and are just as noteworthy. Let’s take a look at a few of the LEGO creations depicting the Nativity story.

The Simple

One of the things I love about Nativity scenes is the range of forms they can take. From incredibly detailed and intricate representations to very simple and even quite abstract. Even basic bricks could be simply arranged to make a recognizable Nativity scene! Microscale as we all know can be quite a challenge, so the qualification “simple” refers only to the representation of the figures, not necessarily build techniques.

City Sustainable has a nice little Nativity they built several years ago to incorporate into a larger winter village. In spite of only using round bricks and plates, it’s quite clear who is represented.

“Simple” doesn’t mean easy, either. Johnathan Gale built a Nativity scene using stacked 4L bars and lit from behind! It is a beautiful example of how abstract forms can easily express a familiar scene.

Minifigure Scale

Our beloved LEGO minifigures unsurprisingly make up the majority of LEGO Nativity scenes I was able to find. Some builders go for a more artistic style while others attempt to replicate something closer to the historical Bethlehem and the cave that tradition has passed down as the location of the manger in Luke’s Gospel.

We’ll start with HappyMac’s build, with a more stylized stable backdrop. I particularly love the brick-built animals. The camels are particularly well done.

The NPU (nice parts usage) award goes to The Family Brick for using the ship bow piece to represent the crèche. Brilliant!

Emanuele Cavallo gives us a more expanded scene. It features a rock path, some town folk milling about, a Roman soldier, and the cave itself.

Incorporating some of the buildings of Bethlehem, byMartin built this bustling scene. Palm trees, a Technic-pin thatched roof on the stable, and lots of other details frame the scene beautifully. To appreciate the build even more, check out this stereo 3D image. It might take a few minutes to load, but it’s well worth the effort!

Brigitte Jonsgard takes a different approach from the last few builds we featured and instead goes for a style that imitates many of the paintings of the Nativity. Using the conical pearl gold hat for Mary’s halo is a nice touch, as are the carol singer heads for the angels.

I’ve seen many pop-culture Nativity scenes as well. Some are what I call “irreverently reverent” and others, to be honest, can be somewhat offensive. But I believe God has a sense of humor, not just because of the platypus (or the hope that the Almighty finds my own shenanigans amusing) but because of how I’ve seen Him act in my life and those around me. So with that in mind, I present a Star Wars Nativity by Steve Petrucelli for your enjoyment (with a perfectly placed Baby Yoda)!

To wrap up minfigure-scale Nativities, here is JK Brickworks’ (Jason Allemann) modification to the Pop-Up-Book LEGO Ideas set he co-designed with Grant Davis. Of course being JKBrickworks, there is a video you can watch below. I particularly like the three Wise Men being represented as the micro-figures approaching in the foreground (not to mention a little #goatflexing).

Miniland & BrickHeadz

Taking it to the next level (literally), we now go to Miniland and BrickHeadz scale. Although minifigures give you a lot of facial expressions to work with, capturing emotions with a miniland figure relies solely on the body language that the builder captures in the bricks.

Marin Stiokovic built these lovely Miniland scale figures. I like the color choices and the poses that they’ve captured. It’s a simplistic scene, yet the details and postures create a true sense of the moment.

Monsterbrick has a different take on Miniland scale. It is a bit less colorful and more stylized than the previous build, but still instantly recognizable. The giant wheel rims as crowns on the Three Kings got my attention, as well as the unique use of transparent and canopy pieces as robes.

Michel Tourista via the Headz Brick group on Facebook has a delightful BrickHeadz scale Nativity. I think the giant donkey ears and the yellow minifigure life preserver ring for the halo are my favorite parts of this one (not to mention the duck hiding on the roof).

Large and Unique

Christmas is a big deal for a lot of people and sometimes something big or unique is required!

We’ll start with Josh DaVid’s offering. I debated including this as it’s not a Nativity scene per se, but it is an element of the Christmas story. Josh built a moving kinetic sculpture of Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem. As a static build it is quite beautiful, but the motion captures the weary journey so nicely! Be sure to check out the video.

Palixa and the Brick built a table lamp that can have four different screens mounted to it. The Christmas version is featured in this lovely back-lit Nativity scene. The build is a great example of using negative space to convey the scene. It is about as close to stained glass in LEGO as you can get at this scale.

Alanboar gives us another artistic style representation. I love the “popping-off-the-canvas” look to the build, and clever parts usage abounds. I especially love that Fabuland jug representing one of the Three Kings’ gifts of frankincense.

Bryan Kilfoil made a 96x144 stud mosaic render based on the art image from a Rainbow Resource puzzle. He uses flowers and open studs used to get varying tones in the shading as well as printed tiles used at will for more detail. That’s some very creative mosaic parts usage!

Now on to some truly large creations. At some point—likely when a LUG (LEGO Users Group) out of Ohio put on a display at Our Lady of the Shows—the Shrine commissioned several large pieces including a life-sized Nativity and mosaic. Unfortunately, I don’t know the name of the builder(s) to give them proper credit, but they are very well done! (If you know who created these, please let us know in the comments!)

The mosaic included in the exhibit is nearly floor to ceiling—I’d estimate it at about 10 feet tall by 6 wide, and as you can see, it takes up the entire end of a hallway! It also only uses basic colors to convey all that detail! The mosaic depicts The Song of the Angels, an oil painting by French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

My Humble Offerings

I’ve built three Nativity scenes myself. The first was actually through LEGO’s “Design by Me” program that they ran in the early 2000s where you could submit a design and they would mail you a box printed with the design and the pieces needed to build it. It is a rather simple undertaking and was a gift for my wife who loves Nativity scenes. We have at least five that stay up year-round plus more that come out as Christmas draws near. The sheep and Mary’s head-covering are from Brick Forge if I remember correctly. There was some torso swapping as well!

My second LEGO Nativity was in miniland scale and was built for GtwLUG’s recurring show at Our Lady of the Snow’s “Way of Lights” display. It is also my first attempt at miniland scale building. It is a piece that still makes me happy and haven’t felt the need to improve on. Thanks to my LUG-mate Shawn S. for the stable build! (Yes, the model is displayed in a fish tank—it was on a table where we couldn’t fit stanchions so it needed protection from any curious kids!)

Finally, I created this simple 16x16 stud mosaic, built this year to fill in a place within a frame of nine other 16x16 mosaics in a small collaboration. (Unfortunately I only had a picture of it in the larger frame, thus the poor photo quality.)

This was a really quick build for me. It is also a reminder to myself of something I’ve been struggling with. As a Christian, I’m supposed to have hope. Hope is not just unfailing optimism or wishing for the best. To me, hope is the confident expectation of God’s blessings and plan (roughly paraphrased from Catechism of the Catholic Church 2090). In the midst of a global pandemic that is nearing two years long among other things, hope has been hard for me to hold onto as I’m sure it has been for others. So I built a simple scene of the Holy Family with HOPE underneath as a reminder.

To all who celebrate, I wish you the very merriest of Christmases! And to those of other traditions, I wish that your Holidays and Holy Days or even just your days off are joyful and renew your spirits as well.

Have you built a Nativity scene for yourself or public display? Let us know in the comments below!

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