On the second day of Christmas, celebrate Saint Stephen’s day, or the story of Good King Wenceslaus, or anything else that is Christmas.

Five years ago my son celebrated his first Christmas as a seminarian. Saint Charles Borromeo, the seminary in Philadelphia where half of the Arlington seminarians go, had a number of lovely traditions that were blown apart in the following year of pandemic. But that first year we went up the Philadelphia in early December for a Christmas concert, and to see the collection of Nativity sets that the library set out every year, back then. It was huge but here are a few pictures from it.

Here’s another.

Another…

Check out the turban on the gentleman on the left.

Random people. Every set of shelves across the room had six or eight or ten Nativity sets.

The arms on this one are extremely confusing!

The building that the seminary is currently using is closing. It has housed seminarians for, I think, 150 years. It will become a hospital annex. I hope dearly that next year, on the new campus, the old Nativity sets will be brought out once more.