The Jesse Tree is a familiar decoration in the weeks of Advent.

The name Jesse in Hebrew has the meaning "God exists".

In the middle ages the Jesse Tree became very popular in showing the genealogy of Jesus, as a family tree using symbols to represent the different personages.

This was a teaching aid for all those unable to read or to afford a Bible.

 

My father would sit in his armchair beside the fire and tuck me in beside him. It was a tight squeeze but it was great to have this special time for just the two of us and I was secure, wedged between his hip and the arm of the chair.

I would have been eight or nine as I had received the children’s bible as a present for my first communion. We started with creation and I read our way through. At the end of every session he would hand me a pen and I would sign my name on the page with the date.
The stories, especially those great stories of the Old Testament become really vivid in my mind and remain with me to this day. I can still recall the images of David fighting Goliath and for some reason Solomon shocking the two women telling them that the baby was to be cut in half.  This was amazing stuff, real blood and guts, life and death.

Forty years later, I’m married with Sheila and we have six kids. I am walking in a Christian community in the Neocatechumenal Way that has at its centre the holiness of the family and the passing of faith through a family liturgy.
To earn a crust I have a retail shop, and like so many other retailers, have just experienced 42 months of continuous decline in sales.
One good thing about the recession is that it gave me time to think and it got me thinking of my experiences with my father, the difficulties nowadays that we have in passing faith to children, and the family liturgy received through the action of the Holy Spirit. I prayed, and it wasn’t long before the Jesse Box was conceived.

I knew straight away that lots of help would be needed to turn this idea into a reality. Gerry Malone was my first port of call. Gerry and his wife Anne have been doing a family liturgy at home for the past twenty years and they can see the fruit of this.

Gerry and I got working. It started off as just a nativity scene. It was beautiful nativity scene designed by a fantastic designer called Pamela Hill, but when I went to get it made in factory I worked with in Thailand, they wouldn’t make it for me! I was dumbfounded and dejected, this was a real blow to my pride, no factory had ever refused to make something for me before.
There was a real action of God in this. It then became obvious that what was needed was a way to tell all those great bible stories, not just the nativity story.  So what started off as a fixed crib type scene developed into a flexible diorama where the backgrounds can be changed for every story and the characters are interchangeable. It was within the struggle to come up with a flexible system that we linked up with another brilliant designer Beta Franca and the idea to put the characters on wooden cones was born. We wanted to have all the new stories on line so that once the initial purchase was made all people had to do was go online and print out the new backgrounds and characters for free. Once we thought of the cone idea everything else started to flow freely.

The final part of the jigsaw fell into place when Sebastian Kraszkiewicz came on board. Sebastian has all the energy and enthusiasm needed to go out and tell the whole world about The Jesse Box.  From a business perspective this is essential. I look on the project like a bicycle, the front wheel is the evangelisation the rear wheel is the business.

The response we are getting to the Box so far have been very very encouraging.

- taken from an interview with Reality Magazine, December 2011.

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