Impossible!

I babysit a couple of kids from when they get out of school until when their mother gets home in the evening. I don't know what religion they are, other than they aren't Christian. But they do know the nativity scene. Because the older one, as I was picking him up from school on Friday pointed out the Mary + Joseph + manager for baby Jesus and told me that it was impossible.

The reason why it was impossible?

They didn't have nails back then and so they couldn't have a manger. It was a million years ago and they didn't have nails a million years ago.

I'm not a Christian, so I can't say I care if this child believes in the nativity scene or not. That's for him to look for and decide when he gets older. But he did make some factual errors in how we count time and about the existence of nails.

I tried to explain to him that the idea was that Jesus was born only about 2000 years ago, hence why we call it two thousand and ten. The idea is that Jesus was born in the year zero. He seemed to accept this.

But then I said that even two thousand years ago they had nails, they didn't look like the nails we had today, but they still had nails. Nails have been around longer than the idea of Jesus. We've had nails for thousands of years.

That however was far too ridiculous. I was flatly told that having nails for so long was impossible. "That's ridiculous! It's impossible! Nails didn't exist back then."