When I was a child, setting up the family nativity scene was a job that involved the whole household. The day began with retrieving the many boxes that held everything we needed: papier-mâché landscapes, the sheet with the starry sky, the many plaster figurines of the Holy Family, the Three Wise Men and the shepherds, but above all a great many sheep. On this point my father would not hear reason. For him, every shepherd (and there were quite a few) had to have a proper flock. And so, in the end, our nativity scene looked like a tribute to sheep farming, and in the midst of the flocks a tiny, naked newborn child was meant to remind us, if you could manage to glimpse him among all those four-legged creatures, that it was his Christmas.

As a counterpoint, I came up with a very minimal, space-saving nativity. Like a sort of Russian matryoshka doll (not by chance, since the Russian word means “mother”), Joseph contains the Virgin Mary, who in turn carries the baby Jesus in her womb and, since there was a little room left, his tiny cradle as well.