We had a small Christmas tragedy mid-December when my cat jumped on the piano and knocked one of the three wise men to the floor, shattering the entire lower half of his body.

Actually, it didn’t feel like a tragedy when it happened. Partially because it was like 6:20 AM and I was frantically trying to do all my last-minute preparations to depart for work. I didn’t even pick up the pieces; I just left all his wise little bits all over the floor to deal with that afternoon.

I was annoyed, but not devastated, because this nativity set is not precious–it’s just a placeholder. And to make this story make sense we have to travel back in time to… I think the 1980s?

My grandmother made a ceramic nativity set for my mom in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Apparently this was A Thing for a little bit, to go to a class and paint this pre-made nativity yourself before firing. My mom’s set is an unusual brown glaze with darker highlights in the folds of clothing. It was the only nativity she had when I was little, and it was my favorite Christmas decor. I loved unpackaging and rediscovering each piece, and carefully setting them on her desk for display. She has other nativity sets now, most of them significantly more beautiful than the brown one, but the weird glazed 1980s set has always been my favorite.

When my husband and I moved to a new apartment in Queens in 2009, I suddenly had the space for a nativity set. What I really wanted was my mom’s set, but that wasn’t going to happen. So I scoured ebay for weeks and finally found this set: made from the same molds with the same figures. Incomplete because it was already missing a camel. Also it’s not brown–it’s painted in actual colors, and it has an unknown woman’s initials carved into the bottom of each figure.

It was strange: the same but different. It was Not Quite Right. But… it was a placeholder. This, I figured, would do until I could convince my mother to pass along her brown set.

So when I returned home from work and finally set to cleaning up the shattered wise man, my initial thought was that the time had come to dispose of this set and ask my mom for hers. After all, you cannot have a nativity set with only two wise men. And–fortuitously–my mom has been making solid progress downsizing her possessions in preparation for a big move to the other side of the state. She is probably done hosting big Christmas celebrations, and it seems reasonable to think she would be ready to hand off her heirloom set to me, her beloved and responsible eldest daughter.

But as I picked up the pieces of my wise man, I was struck by a realization.

I really like this nativity set. It is precious to me. It is not a placeholder, and hasn’t been for years. The colors, which seemed so gaudy to me at first, are actually really lovely and the pieces complement each other really well despite all being painted in different colors. I have repaired the horns on the cow several times over the years, and Joseph’s fingers are glued on at a weird angle (cats are the worst). This is the only nativity set my kids have ever known, and I’ve set it up in two apartments and two houses. I’ve packaged it up in old issues of the New York Times, and old issues of the Star Tribune, and in my husband’s old Christmas sweaters.

I don’t want a different nativity set. I want this one. This is my beloved set.

I fixed the damn wise man. I set up a little workspace with a lamp and some krazy glue and worked that afternoon getting him put back together. The cat watched, unrepentant, from the other side of the table.

I did a pretty good job–he looks okay and stands just fine. His cracks seem to present us with a fun seasonal metaphor (we all get broken on our way to Jesus?). The nativity will live another season, and hopefully another and another after that.

I packed each of them away yesterday with a new reverence.