Edible Nativity Scenes? Bacon, Sausage and Spam Served on La Mesan’s Blog

La Mesa’s Mark Oestreicher has gotten the gift of viral website traffic this holiday season—all for showcasing “bad nativity scenes” on his blog.

Among them: edible scenes with bacon and sausage, or Spam or S’mores. Also: rubber duckies, shotgun shells and small zombies.

“That blog post had been a wild ride,” Oestreicher said last week. “About 300,000 people have visited that post in the last week (mostly due to 20,000 ‘shares’ on Facebook).”

David Moye, the La Mesa writer for Huffington Post, featured Oestreicher’s oddball collection in a story posted Dec. 3.

For the past five years, Moye wrote, Oestreicher has been “collecting photos of what he believes are the worst nativity scenes ever made and posting them on his blog.”

“I find the ones that depict the nativity with cats or dogs to be hideously laughable,” Oestreicher is quoted as saying. "Same with the kitchen timer that features Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”

But Moye said Oestreicher’s comments regarding the nuttier nativity scenes have made some people cross.

“I’ve had a few sour comments about how the blog post displeases God. But I point out that this is the same God who created laughter.”

Who is Oestreicher—this collector of sacreligious nativity scenes?

“While my day job is running my own company—The Youth Cartel—I’m a  volunteer leader at in La Mesa—and have been for 13 years,” he told La Mesa Patch.

Oestreicher, 48, lives with his family near Porter Hill and the La Mesa Community Pool.

 “We’ve lived in East County for 13 years, but the last four in La Mesa,” he said.

His teenage children—Liesl and Max—attend the Waldorf School, a private school in San Diego.

 On Tuesday, in his latest blog post, Oestreicher confessed:

Though I mocked all those nativities on my blog, I’ve slowly grown fond of many of them. I still get a scratchy feeling in my throat when I look at the cat nativity. And the Hummel-like little kids freak me out a bit. But some of the latter additions just make me smile. Yes, some of it is laughter. But it’s more than that.

The other day I was thinking about this, and realized that for all my snarkiness, we have a fairly high number of wide-ranging nativities in our own home every Christmas time to come out of the closet and show them all to you.

He posted a photo of his quilted nativity Advent calendar—“a favorite of my kids (now 14 and 17) for years.

“Every morning,” he said, “they take turns moving the character of the day up to the scene.”