Topics : RELIGION : Creche Brings Heated Summertime Debate

The sun of late spring beats down on Sierra Madre, where the talk is all about Christmas.

The Sierra Madre News stirred up considerable passion last month after it reported that this year would mark the end of a decades-old tradition of having a manger scene in a city park from Thanksgiving to Christmas.

Not so, say officials with the city and the Sierra Madre Chamber of Commerce--which oversees the creche and organizes a candlelight walk and caroling. They say the manger scene will not be relocated.

Although newspaper editor and publisher Jan Reed stands by her story, city officials say the account about the creche was inaccurate and purposefully provocative.

“This is a small town. Word travels fast,” Mayor Maryann MacGillivray said.

The City Council “has never, ever had a conversation to change things” regarding the creche, she said. Nor, she said, is there reason to change.

City Administrator Sean Joyce was quoted in the newspaper last month as saying that “a small minority of complainants over the last three years vehemently opposed using” the sliver of a park at the town crossroads of Sierra Madre Boulevard and Baldwin Avenue.

Because of that opposition, based on the principle of separation of church and state, Joyce was quoted as saying, city officials approached church leaders and asked them to consider rotating the creche location annually among the town’s eight churches.

Joyce declined to comment on the newspaper’s account.

The Chamber of Commerce last year rented the park for the creche but Joyce was quoted as saying that practice would have to end: “What happens if a Nazi group wanted to rent the park?”

The news of Joyce’s remarks set off immediate reaction. Each year, an estimated one in four of the town’s less than 11,000 residents participate in a candlelight walk on the Sunday night before Christmas.

One letter writer to the Sierra Madre News called for a citywide referendum, adding: “I would like to confront the few individuals who must have an awful lot of hate in them not to allow something as sweet and harmless as a Nativity scene . . .”

Another wrote: “If (people) feel the creche . . . is offensive, they can choose to ignore it, learn to accept it or move . . .”

But one letter writer, Ivy Dodwell, a 14-year resident, dissented. “My only objection is with leaving the creche in the public park,” she wrote.

Dodwell, 43, now says that she was among the few who have called city officials to complain, especially after city workers’ time was used to dismantle the creche last year.

“This is city-sanctioned religion,” she said. “There are certain laws about separation of church and state. I think people forget the concepts this country was founded on.”

The mayor says legal precedent favors the city. The creche, she said, is an international symbol of Christmas, as are the Christmas tree, Santa Claus and candy canes.