The Great Dragon Audition

For several years now, I have wondered about getting a Nativity scene.  There are all sorts of versions around, from a range of sizes and styles available in cathedral gift shops to a tiny Mexican folk art version that I once saw in a gift shop.  Books on handicrafts offer patterns to make your very own woollen ‘Knitivity’.

When I’ve raised the subject with PDB11, his answer has always been: ‘What I’d really like to have is a dragon Nativity.’  It’s not that he thinks that Jesus was a dragon, even in a fantasy universe, but just that, as a Christian who likes fantasy fiction involving dragons, he would like to combine the two ideas.

A web search for ‘dragon Nativity’ brought up three main results.  Firstly, there are a number of essays arguing that you should include a dragon in Nativity scenes, in reference to the allegorical poem in Revelation 15 picturing Satan as a dragon attempting to eat Jesus.

I did once have a go at making a Christmas card with a dragon on it, but everyone said it looked weird.  More recently, for Michaelmas, I made a cake in the shape of a dragon guarding a hoard of blackberries, in reference to the legend that St Michael cast the Devil out of Heaven and he landed in a bramble bush. It took a whole bottle of food-dye to turn the marzipan covering him a sufficiently dark red, as a pink dragon wouldn’t look at all Satanic.

A Chinese wooden Nativity scene has a different take.  In Chinese tradition, the dragon, rather than being an evil monster, represents the Emperor, so including a Chinese dragon in the scene honours Jesus as true Emperor over our lives.

But what about Nativity scenes where all the characters are played by model dragons?  There’s a story about a woman in Louisiana who received an angry anonymous letter about her habit of decorating her garden with a group of large inflatable dragons at Christmas.  There used to be adverts for an adorable set of little modelling clay dragons as Jesus, Mary, Joseph, shepherds and magi, but the artist didn’t sell these outside North America, and now no longer seems to be selling them at all, so I’ll just include a picture.

Earlier this year, I had a go at writing a children’s story in which a child’s collection of toy dragons, hearing how their owner has been in a Nativity play at school, decide to stage their own version.  PDB11 and I realised that, if it came to that, we have plenty of dragons who would probably enjoy doing this.

So, yesterday PDB11 cleared out a suitable windowsill to make space for them, and today we called our assorted dragons together to audition.  It was interesting seeing just how many we had accumulated over the years.  Many have lived with PDB11 for longer than I have, starting with an old red rubber dragon toy whom PDB11 has had for as long as he can remember.  He wishes he still had the dragon made out of knotted cord (originally green, but faded to grey) that his mother made. 

At least he still has Gandalf, the clay dragon whom his mother, a potter, made.  I wish that I could have known my mother-in-law, who died before I met PDB11, and that I could have known my father-in-law when he was younger.  At least I have a brother-in-law whom I get on well with, and PDB11 and my own mother are good friends (which includes sympathising with each other when I am being impossible to live with).  But my mother-in-law’s presence lives on in the things she made: some of our crockery (including the cup with a little clay newt hiding at the bottom), a foil leopard made from the wrapper of an Easter egg, and a few of her clay animals: Gandalf, a walrus, and a Siamese cat caught in the act of washing his intimate regions.

Gandalf has a name beginning with a G in reference to the clay dragons in The Last Dragon Chronicles, all of whose names begin with G.  Several of our other dragons follow this pattern, too: sleepy old Gerontius, and Grogu, who, with his pencil, looks rather like Gadzooks in The Last Dragon Chronicles (a dragon with the magical power to inspire writers), but, as PDB11 commented, he looks even more like a baby Yoda, so he inevitably wound up with a Star Wars name.

The population of downstairs dragons, made of wood, clay, resin, metal or glass, who live either on the living-room mantelpiece or on shelves in the kitchen, has grown over the years.  When I met PDB11, he already had Rangarig (named after a character in Märchanmond), an arch-backed dragon made of wire springs whom he had bought from a market stall in Covent Garden, Nagaraju (a carved wooden Indonesian dragon whom he bought in Jakarta), and two glass dragons with green wings which, like those of the dragons in The Flight of Dragons), seem to be a modified ribcage.

However, most of the dragons who then shared the house with my future husband were cuddly toys roosting on the top of the bookcase in his bedroom (along with a dinosaur and a crocodile who counted as honorary dragons), guarding a hoard of a thousand or so novels, mostly science fiction and fantasy.  Apart from Mary and Edgar, named after PDB11’s grandparents, most of them didn’t yet have names, though PDB11 had decided that one of the red ones was probably named Dim, even if he wasn’t sure which one.  Eventually we named the furry green one Wimble, after a gentle vegetarian dragon in a story by John Cunliffe.

The orange dragon with a serpentine, Chinese-style body but wings like a European dragon may already have earned the name Fexx, after the wild dragon whom Yu, the heroine of the Drachenhof Feurfels series which PDB11 has translated, tames and rides.  I suspect that our Fexx, with his unusual mixture of features, is mixed-race, the child of the dragons in John Wyndham’s story Chinese Puzzle.

But since then, we have acquired more.  When my father-in-law needed to sell off his old furniture when he moved into an old people’s home, we took it to an auction house where we met a little ivory creature who we thought might be a Siamese dragon, though he could be a koimanu. 

As it is illegal to sell ivory, the auctioneer said we could have him for free.  We named him Ping Ping, after the dragon belonging to Yu’s friend Rosabella.  Later on, working in a charity shop where we were brought a hand-made pink felt toy that looked like something between a dragon and a pegasus, which we also couldn’t sell because it didn’t carry a toy safety label, I brought this one home and named her Rosabella, as the girl in the Feurfels books adores the colour pink.

Shortly after my father-in-law died, we bought Lung (pronounced long) to cheer ourselves up.  He is named after the hero of the Drachenreiter books, renamed Firedrake in the English version, since our Lung actually is a fire-dragon, with a space in his belly to place a lit candle.

We haven’t got around to having children, but we do seem to have acquired more baby dragons in recent years.  My mother gave me Grogu and, as an Easter present, a wyvern still in his egg, whom I gave to PDB11 hidden inside a chocolate egg.  I wondered about naming the baby Grockle, after another Last Dragon Chronicles character, but PDB11 suggested Bryony if it was a girl or Vyrnwy if it was a boy.  In Anne McCaffrey’s novels, dragons in colours beginning with B are boys and those in colours beginning with G are girls.  It was hard to be sure, as this one had a blue back and a golden-yellow tum, but we decided that he was probably male, so the name Vyrnwy stuck.  Dungeon Master gave us a baby dragon even smaller than these two, whom we named Errol after the little swamp dragon who saves the city in Guards! Guards! 

Then there are the cuddly baby dragons.  We won glittery blue Ignatz at a funfair in Munich, hence his Bavarian name. Bumble (named after a dragon in the Dragonsdale series) was a misfit in a tray of toy dinosaurs at a roadside service station, the only person to have wings in addition to four paws. 

They settled happily into the bookcase colony, until, last Christmas, my brother-in-law gave us a crocheted green and white baby dragon whom we named Sprout, who was so cuddly that she had to be allowed to share our bed – so Ignatz and Bumble didn’t see why they shouldn’t be allowed in, too.  These days, they snuggle in between us when we read stories together, and only have to be evicted when we want to use the bed for something they shouldn’t watch. 

Sprout is also very obliging about letting PDB11 use her as a pillow.  But then, all cuddly toys are descended from pillows that have evolved Kirbyan mimicry to take advantage of human nurturing instincts.

Essex Granny contributed Gerontius, Archie (a little plaque of a dragon standing at an arched doorway), and two more dragons whom we gave Feuerfels names to: the little blue one with a horn on his nose was Cjalar, and the larger blue one being ridden by a man with long flowing hair had to be Udor, the radiant dragon belonging to Yu’s frenemy (and eventually Rosabella’s boyfriend) Jaromir.

This caused a slight problem, as a wooden carving that Harley Street Therapist had already given us, of a somewhat Chinese-looking dragon holding a pearl and encircled by a sun-like pattern, was already at least tentatively named Udor, since he was clearly a radiant dragon.  We wondered what to do about this, until PDB11 suggested naming the wooden dragon Ming, which means ‘bright’.

So there were clearly more potential actors than parts.  Mary the dragon was obviously playing the Virgin Mary, so I wondered whether Edgar, her partner in real life, should play Joseph.  But PDB11 suggested that it would be better to cast Edgar and Ignatz, with their shiny wings, as angels, probably wearing tinsel halos.  So Fexx is Joseph.  I suggested that Vyrnwy, as the only egg in the group, should play Jesus.

Lung, Nagaraju and either Ping Ping or Rangarig, with their oriental looks, could be the Three Wise Dragons from the East.  Wimble and Dim (we decided that the one in the football boots is Dim) are shepherds, and Bumble, Sprout and the crocodile can be their sheep.  Gerontius can be an ox in the stable, as the part doesn’t require him to do anything more strenuous than snooze, and Rosabella, with her equine looks and long ears, is an unusually colourful donkey.  Archie is an amiable innkeeper, Ming of course is the star shining over Bethlehem, and I think Grogu should get a part as St Luke, writing the story down for posterity.

Do we need any more beasts in the stable?  Well, the old red rubber dragon can play – the dragon.  After all, with his snaky body, horns, and gaping, toothy jaws, he can manage to look quite diabolical, if you don’t know that he has been a well-behaved family pet for over fifty years.

I don’t know whether anyone will even notice our display, let alone take offence, but it seems less likely in Somerset, where dragons are quite popular, than in Louisiana.  As I’ve noticed in the past, while the mediaeval legends regard dragons as the personification of evil and tell stories of dragon-slaying saints, the Celtic legends treat dragons simply as part of Creation, and tell stories of saints who tame dragons and persuade them not to harm humans. 

So the point of a display about dragons putting on a Nativity play isn’t to imply that Jesus was a dragon – any more than religious art painted in different parts of the world making Jesus look European, black or Chinese means that he was European, black or Chinese.  It is simply to say that, if a Jewish Saviour can save all humanity, including Gentiles, then a human Saviour can save all creatures, including dragons.

And yes, I know how ridiculous it was that PDB11 and I, two middle-aged adults, spent a good chunk of an afternoon playing with toy dragons.  I don’t regret it a bit.  As PDB11 says, most adults would use having children or grandchildren as an excuse to play with toys.  As we don’t have children, we just avoid growing up.ere are all sorts of versions around, from a range of sizes and styles available in cathedral gift shops to a ti