Christmas manger scene figurines - Hay man

All our santons are real Provencal Christmas santons. They have been handcrafted in terracotta and painted by hand for 3 generations.

Each subject is first modeled by hand to create the mold. In production, each subject is hand painted, color by color, in oils and acrylics.

The French word santon comes from the Provencal santoun which means "little saint". Originally, the living cribs were intended to recreate the scene of the Nativity in the churches, and since the Middle Ages under St. Francis of Assisi. But the French revolution banned them in public, which led families to use dummy figurines to continue the tradition in their homes.

These characters were made of different materials (paper mache, breadcrumbs, plaster). In Marseille, in the nineteenth century, the competition of Neapolitan merchants who sold santibelli, has generated a resistance from the Provencal santonniers. The latter imposed the cooked clay and proposed their creations on markets of santons. These are still very popular today, in parallel with the Christmas markets.