The Christian Appeal (December 2000)
Issue Theme: God in the Flesh

"The Pageant"
by Gene Shelburne

"Without doubt my town boasts one of the premier Christmas pageants in the world. Nobody anywhere could possibly do it better.

But the glorious Paramount Terrace church production with all of its spectacular staging and its exquisite music will never hold a candle to the pageant performed in my den on a recent Christmas Eve.

The genius in our family pageant lay in the fact that it was utterly unplanned, unrehearsed, and unsophisticated, prompted solely by the baby doll 7-year-old granddaughter Kimberly received that night as her gift.

"Where’s Grammy?" Kim came to inquire not long after we had dispersed from exchanging gifts around our tree. "We’ve got a program we want everybody to see."

When the scattered grownups finally were re-assembled, 6 of our grandkids appeared with the principal prop. Kim’s doll had become the baby Jesus, asleep in a brand new Lego-bucket manger complete with fake hay fashioned from huge hay-colored nerf letters filched from a gift 6-year-old Will had just opened.

With arms spread wide holding a baby bed sheet across her back to simulate angel wings, Kim announced with proper angelic authority to 8-year-old Nick and 9-year-old Jill (now Joseph and Mary wearing bedsheet-robes), that they were going to have a baby named Jesus.

Will startled us with fluent lines the grandkids had made up only moments before. First he played the shepherd who heard another angelic proclamation from Kimberly. "Come," Will summoned fellow-shepherds 3-year-old Peter and 1½-year-old Thomas, "let’s go see the baby!"

Without benefit of costume (another sheet-turned-robe) change, Will metamorphed into the innkeeper, who sternly informed Joseph and Mary that he had no rooms.

Out of the theater wings (otherwise known as Grammy’s hallway) scurried the entire cast—shepherds and holy family— to gather around the Lego-bucket manger. During the hasty scene change baby Jesus slipped out of Jill/Mary’s grasp and landed on his head, but a few giggles later the unruly band of shepherds were bowed down before the manger, worshiping Mary’s newborn son.

All of this without one whit of adult instigation or coaching. Thus, in a way that no magnificently staged pageant ever could, 6 innocent children caused us once more to know the meaning of Christmas.