Many in Malta set up the nativity scene in their homes for Christmas but Michael Caruana does not just set up one crib but hundreds of them.

Caruana, who is from Santa Venera, owns a collection of about 450 small cribs, featuring 1,700 statuettes (pasturi) in all.

He has been collecting these cribs since 2001. Every year, until the pandemic broke out in 2019, he would visit the various Christmas markets in Europe together with his wife, Joan. Over the years, he also received cribs from other countries outside Europe as gifts.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led Caruana to work on a number of small cribs himself and enlarge his local collection.

A member of the MUSEUM from Żurrieq, Ġużi Sammut, helped him out in this regard. When he heard about Caruana’s collection, he provided him with a number of caves and statuettes made along the years by members of the society of Christian doctrine. These include papier mȃché, wood and wax figurines.

This year, Sammut donated Caruana a set of original wax statuettes made by Nazzareno Gauci, known as Ta’ Disma, from Żejtun (1927-1995).

Caruana also sought the help of carpenter Tano Barbara of Ħamrun to build the cribs he got from abroad, mostly those from Germany.

His other cribs are from Austria (Vienna), the Netherlands (Amsterdam), Poland (Krakow), Italy (Assisi, Rome, Naples and the Vatican), Hungary (Budapest), Slovakia (Bratislava), Slovenia (Ljubljana), Belgium (Brussels) and France (Lourdes). He also bought cribs through local missionaries abroad and received some as gifts from Bolivia, Guatemala, Peru, Sicily, England, the US, the Holy Land and Mexico.

Caruana and his wife are looking forward so that, once the pandemic is over, they would be able to visit the Christmas market in Strasbourg, France, which is considered to be one of the most beautiful and the oldest Christmas market in Europe.