For 52 years now, the Nativity scene on the front lawn of Memorial Gunter Peel Funeral Home has been a Christmas tradition, possibly the longest uninterrupted tradition in town.
The scene consists of plaster cast Mary and Joseph and Baby Jesus, the latter securely fastened to the manger, a response to an irreverent goat who had the habit of carrying around the babe in his mouth one year. No offense to the familiar characters, but it is the live animals that draw visitors to the scene.
“We start getting calls right after Thanksgiving,” said Floyd McIntyre, who’s been with the funeral home on Second Avenue North since 1988. “People want to know when the sheep are coming.”
It’s a traditional Nativity scene with no apparent effort to make it “bigger and better” each passing year.
Even so, this year’s scene may have outdone itself.
There’s not just one “mother and child” in the scene, but two this year, according to Gail Ford, who has supplied the animals for the scene for close to 25 years.
“This year, we sent Emily and her two lambs, Tyler and C.D.,” Ford said. “Emily lambed (the term used when sheep give birth) in October. Emily was in the scene last year and did fine, so we decided to send her back this year, this time with her babies.”
Tyler is the smaller of the lambs, for those who want to be on a first-name basis as they visit.
“We always put up the scene first, then bring in the animals a little later,” McIntyre said. “They got here last Thursday and they’ll stay until shortly after Christmas.”
Throughout the Christmas season, visitors stop to take in the scene, pet the animals and sometimes offer them treats, which they happily nibble.
Ford, who with her husband operates a small goat and sheep ranch in Macon, has about 30 goats and sheep.
From that group, she chooses for the Nativity scene the animals who are most familiar with humans, most often those who’ve been bottled fed. Although sheep are generally nurturing moms, they sometimes reject their newborn after birthing.
It’s a situation that Ford is dealing with now, in fact.
“I’m bottle-feeding three lambs that were born just last week,” she said. “During the lambing, the third lamb was a breach birth and we had to help deliver her. It was a lot of trauma for the mama and after it was over, I guess she decided she didn’t want to have anything to do with them.”
Ford is keeping the lambs in her house (“we have them in diapers,” she said) and expects to ween them when they are about eight weeks old. Normally, lambs will nurse until they are about a year old and stop only when the mama refuses to nurse.
Emily was one of those bottle-fed lambs, but her children won’t be, thankfully.
“She’s a very good mama,” Ford said.
Emily has also proven to be an excellent Nativity scene character.
“She’s very vocal,” Ford said. “People like that.”
Hopefully, there will be no drama associated with the scene this year, which was not the case one year not long after Ford began providing the animals, something that is still a topic of conversation today.
“We sent a goat and two sheep up there that year and somehow, the sheep got out,” Ford said. “I heard it was a roundup for a while there.”
McIntyre certainly remembers it.
“When they got out, they were going down Second Avenue,” he said. “We saw them and started chasing them down the street. They went right at some point, crossed Main Street and they headed east on College Street. We were all chasing them like a bunch of fools. We couldn’t catch them. We finally got them back only because they stopped to graze in a empty lot behind a store.”
The funeral home erected a larger, more secure enclosure after the escape and have had no other escape attempts since.
That means Emily, Tyler and C.D., will be “in” the scene, without creating one.
“I’m too old to chase sheep,” McIntyre said.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 32 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
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Floyde McIntyre
