Christmas 2022: Of Cooks and Code-switches


This Christmas, I ponder a Nativity painted over sixhundred years ago by the Westphalian artist Conrad von Soest (+ ca. 1422). There may be more stunning images to think and pray with this Christmas, but Conrad’s painting holds a unique detail that captures a truth woven deeply into today’s feast.

This unique detail comes in the depiction of St. Joseph by Conrad von Soest. In most other images I know, Joseph seems to do nothing much other than stand by, ponder, and adore. In some cases, he has fallen asleep. Certainly, pondering and adoring the mystery that is Christmas is a primary, profoundly appropriate, and imperative posture. We will do well to practice it in the midst of all other holiday festivities.  

Yet at the same time, there is something deeply revealing in Conrad’s depiction of a St. Joseph who is busy kneeling on the stable’s floor and blowing on a little fire in order to heat up some food for Mary. Mary herself is resting in the background, lovingly gazing at her newborn child. Conrad’s St. Joseph, rather than gazing adoringly on both, takes upon himself the domestic labor of food production (a labor that was typically in the hands of women, at least until very recently). And in this painting, thefood production is visibly a lowly and subservient task. St. Joseph kneels on the floor, far below Mother and Child. The mystery of Christmas in this painting – that is, shepherds and angels, donkey and ox, Mary and Child – happens well above the kneeling cook (who is without halo, and whose simple pottage does not look Michelin-star’d, either).

In that image of a lowly, cooking St. Joseph, however,something shines forth about the deepest truth of Christmas. What Conrad’s painting reveals is a code switch, which lies at the heart of the Nativity. And, we might claim in faith, it is the ultimate code switch. What happened in Bethlehem, after all,turns all expectations of what constitutes normality on its head:

St. Joseph kneels to cook.

The quotidian and domestic shine forth as sacred.

A place on the margins is made the very center of the universe.

God becomes human.

And with that: A blessed Christmas to all.

Teresa Berger

Teresa Berger is Professor of Liturgical Studies at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School in New Haven, CT, USA, where she also serves as the Thomas E. Golden Jr. Professor of Catholic Theology. She holds doctorates in both theology and in liturgical studies. Recent publications include an edited volume, Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation (2019), and a monograph titled @ Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds (2018). Earlier publications include Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History (2011), Fragments of Real Presence (2005), and a video documentary, Worship in Women’s Hands (2007).

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4 responses to “Christmas 2022: Of Cooks and Code-switches”

  1. Renee Sheehy

    Thank you for sharing this beautiful picture. For me, it very much calls to mind the medieval practice of the gander month — the month after birth when women were supposed to rest and not work and husbands (if there weren’t servants) took on all the domestic chores. This period ended with the churching blessing. This period of rest after childbirth is common in other cultures even today. I wonder if this was a practice in Westphalia.

    I think there may be some gentle humor in the picture too. Joseph, an older man has, like all husbands whose wife had a baby, to work at a less familiar task.

    Reply
    1. Teresa Berger

      Thank you for this, Renee. I have never heard of this “gander month” and am intrigued. Sadly, a quick look at “Prof. Google” suggests that this had more to do with the husband being allowed to seek sexual pleasures elsewhere than with his wife, rather than him taking on domestic labors during this time?

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      1. Renee Sheehy

        I saw those too when I Googled to check my memory of reading about this a while back. I wonder if it was a later unhappy “development” of the term. If you Google gander month with churching it comes up. A lot of the sources point to David Cressy’s pay-walled article on post-reformation practices but he apparently ties them back to the Middle Ages.

        The depiction of St. Joseph in some medieval art and cycle plays as a slightly comic character is also interesting. To me, I think there is real spiritual value in this depiction as a way of exploring the great holiness of Jesus’ birth and the actual messy reality that required someone to find him diapers and make Mary food. This maybe gave men and women in the Middle Ages a way to envision themselves at the incarnation in tangible terms. Joseph was taking the role of an everyman in a divine working — doing his best to care for Mary and Jesus even if it was sometimes a struggle.

  2. Jeffrey Armbruster

    Is it really so surprising to find a husband tending to his wife after childbirth? If you asked him, I imagine Joseph wouldn’t even consider his actions “humble” or anything of the sort. He was in love, and gladly performed the tasks required, as a matter of course.

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