Around Christmas, if you were lucky, you had a teacher read “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” to your class.
The plot centers around six hooligan children, collectively known as “The Herdmans.” With an absent father and a mother who works shifts, the children raise themselves. They shoplift, lie, cuss, smoke and daily terrorize their classmates. Teachers promote them so they won’t have to teach them a second time.
They go to Sunday School only because they hear they’ll get snacks. There, they learn about the upcoming Christmas pageant. Interested, they bully their classmates into not volunteering for the main parts, leaving the director of the pageant no choice but to cast the Herdmans in the starring roles of Mary and Joseph, the Three Wise Men and the Angel of the Lord.
Remarkably, the Herdmans take their roles seriously, and the drama unfolds in humorous and unexpected ways. Gladys Herdman, as Angel of the Lord, is so terrifying that the shepherds indeed were “sore afraid.” Later the Herdman “wise men” bring the baby Jesus a ham, saying that frankincense and myrrh were cruddy gifts for a baby, especially if he were a king.
Though not on the Herdman scale, I too experienced some Christmas pageant drama.
Every year, under the direction of music teacher Mrs. Lorraine Pigott, our Summit Elementary class held a simple Christmas pageant.
One year, I played a shepherd, wearing a striped towel like Moses around my torso and another atop my head, with Kent O’Neil’s cow rope to fasten the towel in place.
But most years, I played one of the heavenly hosts. With halos and angel wings that my best friend Ginny Price and I constructed out of coat hangers and glued silver garland, we sang “The First Noel” to our beaming, admiring parents.
It was the year I joined what I now call “The Mary Club” that a Herdman-like Gladys almost spoiled my good cheer.
In replicating the Christmas story, the cast rarely deviates: there are multitudes of angels, shepherds keeping watch, three wise men, and one Joseph and one Mary standing over the baby Jesus, usually someone’s naked doll wrapped in a white pillow case.
One year during casting, I was stunned and proud to see my name in blue mimeograph ink: “Janellyn Barnes, Mary.” A tad shy, I was excited, as Mary just had to stand there with a pleasant look on her face.
Sitting in aluminum chairs in the cafeteria- turned- theater, a girl looked me dead in the eye: “You know you can’t play Mary.”
Confused, I asked why not.
“Everybody knows Mary had brown hair. What picture did you ever see with a blonde-headed Mary?”
I wanted her to be wrong, but she wasn’t. Every Mary, mother of Jesus, I’d ever seen had brown hair. I started to cry. A girl close by told our teacher, who hugged me, assuring me I was Mary and that my hair would be mostly covered up with a sheet.
I’m sure I later gave that girl a most unholy Herdman glare.
Four blocks away, near Highway 51, stands the old Presbyterian church that I attended in my childhood. Like the congregation, the sanctuary was small, with dark-stained pews someone told me my grandfather made.
Due to our pastor’s retiring, the little church closed its doors when I turned 13. But a handful of years prior, a handful of children presented Christmas programs that my family remembers as the best little Christmas pageants ever.
Mrs. Martha McMorris doubled as pianist and director for the first program. All went so splendidly that the 6 p.m. program never changed its format in its five- or six-year run.
Of the six to eight children participating, my two sisters, my cousin Henderson Watkins and I comprised the annual four. In white choir robes with red satin ribbons tied in bows around our necks like presents, we clutched candles, our hands loosely protected by small paper bowls. As the candlelight flickered onto the stained glass windows, we sang “O Come All Ye Faithful” in the single-file double-aisle processional to the front.
A solo, more carols, and the reading of the Christmas story followed. The program ended with our hurrying down the aisles, belting out “Joy to the World,” with the congregation, mostly mothers, chiming in.
I asked my sisters their recollections. Emily remembered her solo, “The Little Drummer Boy,” and almost crying in the car after as she’d mixed up the verses.
Elizabeth chimed in: “One year, I sang a solo, ‘Away in a Manger,’ and I thought I was Celine Dion, and I was easily the worst singer in the bunch.” I concur.
I remember fretting over the candles. They were short and seemed to have brains, burning down to the nub just as we reached the front. We were instructed to blow out the candles in unison, and more than once, hot candle wax dripped onto my little bare hands.
Most members of that congregation have since died or moved away, but the memories of these simple childhood Christmas pageants linger. They are as beautiful as the carols we still sing today.
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JANELLYN B.CORNACCHIONE recently completed a 40-year teaching career in three Pike County schools.
