Baby Jesus, Fixed Gear, Artisanal Frankincense

Christmas gets worse every year. Not worse in a clinical sense—just hollower. You can buy yourself whatever you would have asked for as a gift, the novelty of the holiday meal wore off sometime in your late twenties, and the decorations feel like obligations rather than rituals. What used to feel like magic now feels like stage management.

Which is why I appreciated this: a nativity scene designed entirely around the Berlin-Mitte demographic. The manger is there, the infant is there, but the wise men have man-buns and the shepherd is probably explaining the provenance of his locally sourced wool. It’s called the Modern Nativity Set, it costs around $120, and it’s one of those objects that works simultaneously as a critique of a culture and a celebration of it—which is more or less what good design always does.

I don’t actually hate the irony. The hipster as cultural figure is tired, I know, but the nativity scene as a form has been updated by every generation that ever got their hands on it—Flemish painters, Mexican ceramicists, Neapolitan craftsmen who stuck their local rulers into the background as minor figures. Why not Berlin 2016, with its fixie bikes and cold-brew theology? At least it’s honest about who the audience is. The whole point of the nativity as folk art was always to place the sacred inside the recognizable. That’s exactly what this does, just with more linen and worse politics.