[getoffmylawn]

What you're saying makes perfect sense, but then what's the beef with crucifixes, statues, and nativity scenes in Eastern Orthodoxy?

[The_Reader_David]

The tradition in the East is strongly in favor of icons--flat or at most bas-relief--depictions of Christ and the saints.

This is in part, I think, a guard against idolatry: statuary, images in the round, are too realistic. By confining our imagery to icons we make clear that the image is only an image, that veneration show it is directed to the prototype. In part it is because the original examples of iconography, the Icon-not-made-by-hand given by Our Lord to King Abgar of Edessa (via messengers) and the icons of the Theotokos executed as life portraits by St. Luke the Evangelist were flat and bas-relief respectively.

[kosta50]

...what's the beef with crucifixes, statues, and nativity scenes in Eastern Orthodoxy?

There are more crucifixes and crossings in Eastern orthodoxy than Catholicism. As for statues nativity scenes, that's simply not traditional Orthodox iconography.