One of my favourite activities at Christmas in Goa was building the barn for the nativity scene or crib as we called it. We use to whittle bamboo into narrow strips for the frame of the house, and then go out and fetch dried wild grass and use that to build the roof by using the bamboo to hold the grass in place.
And once that was done, we built a star that we would hang in front of the house. Most families built very elaborate stars. We would build a simple one – two five pointed frame tied together with spacers in the middle. It was then covered with tissue paper, decorated and hung.
I didn’t get to do a crib this year, but I did get to help out with the star.
