(RNS) — Drive down the Mass Pike, on Route 128 around Boston or over the Bourne Bridge toward Cape Cod, and you’re likely to see billboards touting the ultimate New England Christmas tradition.
The Lobster Nativity set.
Even if you don’t buy one, the billboards will bring a smile to your face, says Chris Alfonso, the 25-year-old entrepreneur who sells the crustacean Christian display.
“And I think in this day and age, we all need something to laugh about,” said Alfonso, who has been selling the set, where all the characters of Christmas — including the baby Jesus — have been transformed into lobster figurines, since 2023.
Rosemary Quantick, an artist based on Cape Cod, first came up with the idea of replacing the manger with a lobster trap in 2019, as a way to pay tribute to her adopted home. “I wanted to create something that was representative of New England, the place that had become my home over the years,”
Quantick told the Cape Cod Times.
The Three Wise Men ornament. (Photo courtesy of Chris Alfonso)
Alfonso, a friend of Quantick, took one look at the first set that Quantick made and told her she should try selling them. He’d interned for a company that helped inventors get their product to market — and thought they could help her. Eventually, Quantick had about 1,000 sets made and began selling them for Christmas in 2020. She sold about 100 that first year, then 100 more the next year. Things took off in 2023, when Alfonso started helping her sell them at a Boston Christmas market. He eventually bought the rights to the sets and started selling them online and at a holiday market.
He got a break last year, when a TikTok video about the sets went viral, and he sold about 2,500 sets.
The current version of the Nativity features the usual suspects, said Alfonso. There’s baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a shepherd, three wise men, a sheep, a camel, a cow and a little drummer boy (“I know he’s not in the original Nativity,” said Alfonso).
All are displayed in a lobster trap that is painted gray and weathered. The whole set sells for about $115 online. There are also Christmas ornaments with the whole Nativity set or just the Holy Family or the wise men . Alfonso, who grew up Catholic, said he gets some mail from folks who think the set is sacrilegious. But most people get the joke — and even the folks who send hate mail are usually polite, he said.
The set was also inspired by a scene from “Love Actually,” a 2003 British comedy set at Christmastime. In the film, a character played by Emma Thompson is surprised when one of her children has been cast as the “first lobster” in her school’s Christmas pageant, having never heard of biblical shellfish at Christmas.
“There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?” she asks.
“Duh,” her daughter replies in the film.
That scene comes up almost every time Alfonso sells a set at the Christmas market. “I think about playing that clip in a booth on repeat sometimes, because it’s just so funny,” said Alfonso.
The Lobster Nativity scene booth at a holiday market. (Photo courtesy of Chris Alfonso)
The lobster Nativity isn’t the only New England Christmas tradition to feature lobsters. Communities from Rockport, Maine, to Stonington, Connecticut, feature annual displays of Christmas trees made of lobster traps and covered in lights. Christmas shoppers can also get Nativities that feature cats, rubber duckies, Peanuts characters and even 3-D printed “Star Wars” figures, along with more traditional displays.
Vanessa Corcoran, who teaches medieval history at Georgetown University, said the tradition of Nativity displays dates back about 800 years, to a Nativity set up by St. Francis in 1223, with a manger, ox, donkey and a carved baby Jesus. The tradition took off from there.
Nativity displays today are often seen outside churches at Christmas. Every year, the Vatican unveils a custom creche, or Nativity, that is often themed and sometimes made by a marginalized group. And many families have home Nativities they pass down from generation to generation.
Occasionally, Nativities can veer into political territory, like one outside a church near Chicago this year that included a protest against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids or the “Christ in the rubble” displays the last few years, which drew attention to the plight of civilian Palestinians in Gaza.
And then there are the displays that include live animals — camels, donkeys, sheep. The animals do occasionally get loose, like a pair of cows that escaped from a display in North Carolina in 2023.
Nativities have provided Christmas cheer, as well as disputes over politics and the separation of church and state, and for a while, even inspired a series of pranks where people stole the baby Jesus.
Corcoran said many Nativity sets reflect the environment where they are made or displayed, with figures that resemble people in that culture. And in-home Nativity displays remain popular, in part because they make the divine more accessible.
“It offers the opportunity to bring a visual representation of the true Christmas story into one’s home,” she said. “Christian tradition emphasizes that God sent his only son as a baby to save the world. Jesus as a baby is a humble and relatable figure.”
The Lobster Nativity scene. (Photo courtesy of Chris Alfonso)
Alfonso has big plans for the future. He’d like to see a lobster Nativity in every house in New England. After all, he said, lobster is essentially a religion in that part of the country. And he’s enjoyed the chance to make people’s holidays a little brighter.
“I’m a part of people’s holidays,” he said. “People put this display out, they send me pictures of them decorating it, and they’re going to pass it on to their kids.”
