All right, now it’s starting to look pretty good!
The only thing I don’t like right now is the star. I don’t want it to be too eye-grabbing, but it looks very bland right now.
I will be making the fireplace and fire tomorrow, and arranging the lights around and possibly over the stable. Also, I want the tablecloth to be a little skewed or wrinkled rather than perfectly flat and straight. I may also need to adjust the size of that plaid pattern (which I made in Gimp :D).
I got quite a bit of progress done today! I baked a cloth simulation for the tablecloth (although it’s not too noticeable), added a wooden base for the stable, built the room, added a fireplace with fire (which I had never done in Cycles before), set up most of the lighting, and did a lot of tweaking.
This is looking very close to the way I want it. 
Unfortunately, Blender has no GPU support for fire yet, so this is rendered on my CPU. I might render the fireplace seperately, and then piece it in afterwards with the compositer.
There are a few things I want to improve. First, I need to intertwine some Christmas lights with the tinsel. Also, the stockings need just a tad bit of extra lighting, and maybe a little fuzz. The wall color could be better, and I might want to put a wreath or something on the wall so it’s not so bare. I think the fire could be a little brighter, too.
The project is finally done! 
I am rendering the background now on the CPU, and I will render the foreground on the GPU. This way I can tweak them seperately in the compositor.
Looking really nice! I’ve tried to pull of a crèche scene myself several times and never got it to look very good (not my type of modeling), so great job!
Just had a couple quick comments:
Here is the final result! I already entered it into the contest, so it’s set in stone:
(this is a .jpg, the actual image is a .png)
Thank you for the feedback, Peter G! Unfortunately, it’s too late for me to change the tinsel, but I think I did increase the Brownian motion of the hair for the final render. Also, according to your suggestion, I used the compositor to brighten up the foreground a bit.
It feels good to finally complete a major project! I have been using Blender for 5 years or so, but this is the first project of this size I’ve finished.
I called it “Tis the Reason”.
I find it a little funny that you are making a nativity scene yet you titled your thread “X-Mas project”
I think you have done a fantastic job here, really heart warming. I made a scene similar to this when I was a young boy many years ago out of cardboard that I painted and glued together, so this really brings back memories for me.
The only thing that I feel is missing are some animals around the scene, otherwize I hope you do really well in the competition.
Shaun
Thank you! That was the mood I was trying to achieve. Yes, I would have loved adding animals, but unfortunately I didn’t have enough time.
Thank you all for following my thread, and for the tips as well. For those interested, I screencasted the entire project, and I will be uploading a time lapse as soon as possible (it’s split into 47 video files right now).
LOL, so my first Youtube video took a little more time than I had originally expected. 
Here it is!
