rivka | Entries tagged with pageant

So the church Christmas pageant has three Sunday morning rehearsals followed by an evening dress rehearsal the night before Christmas Eve. Only this year we got about 20 inches of snow the day before the last Sunday morning rehearsal, which meant that it didn't happen. Instead, on Wednesday night a bunch of excited hyper pre-Christmas kids showed up for the first rehearsal with costumes (which weren't done, incidentally), the first rehearsal in the sanctuary (which always leads to insane aisle-running), and the first rehearsal without scripts (which was supposed to have happened that missed Sunday).

They had done a surprisingly good job of learning their lines, but everything else about the rehearsal was pretty awful. It's hard to nail down a lot of the blocking before you have the sanctuary to work with. The kids were pretty crazy. I honestly left the rehearsal expecting the performance to be a disaster.

Christmas Eve I was so flustered that we were parking outside the church when I realized that I was still wearing a pair of jeans and a grungy brown wool hoodie over a faded red T-shirt. "I forgot to get dressed!" I wailed to Michael. He looked down at his own jeans and sweater. "...So did I." It was 5pm. I had told the kids to arrive no later than 5:10. I was planning to be onstage for much of the pageant.

We dashed in carrying the last few props and an eleven pound ham. Threw the ham in the oven in the church kitchen and asked someone who happened to be in the kitchen to put the brown sugar glaze on it at 6:30. I took both kids with me to the sanctuary while Michael ran home to change and bring my clothes. The majority of the kids didn't show up until sometime after 5:30. We had no chance to rehearse, but we did go over my list of Important Last-Minute Reminders: Everyone speak LOUDLY and SLOWLY. Face the audience when you speak. When the Herdmans are being bad kids, they shouldn't actually make any physical contact. When the Herdmans are in the pageant-within-a-pageant, they stop goofing off and take it seriously. Angels and shepherds need to be quiet when they're onstage.

Also in this time period, one of the mothers went to town on the Herdmans' faces with a mascara wand to make them appropriately grimy and smudgy. They were all thrilled to be at church in their oldest and most awful clothes. I did not tell them how adorable they were, because they would've taken it the wrong way.

Ten minutes before the service was supposed to start I herded all the kids out of the chancel to the robing room. No, they were too loud to be there. To the little entryway behind the robing room. Still too loud. To the upstairs hall. I tried to engage them in conversation about Christmas to stop them from shouting and chasing each other. Michael brought me Colin to nurse at the last minute before church. I kept on chatting with the kids on my end of the hall until I looked over and saw a few of them at the other end of the hall looking at me like this: O.O O.O O.O "It's just how babies eat, guys," I said and hoped that I wouldn't be hearing from their mothers later on.

6:05. I marched the kids down the stairs, through the entry, through the robing room, into the chancel, and down the steps to the front pew. There was a welcome and a chalice lighting and then we were on.

And the pageant went beautifully.

We had some luck with the play-within-a-play format, because I could stay on stage the whole time (as a parent helping out the pageant director, very realistic) and move people into place if necessary. But the kids needed very little help. They said their lines beautifully and with feeling. They were mostly in the right place at the right time. They did not burn down the church when I let some of them hold candles. They looked fantastic, even the ones who were in totally makeshift last-minute costumes. And they had the pageant spirit, just beautifully.

Afterward during their shaky and confused bows

acceberskoorb swooped down on me with a bouquet of white roses and, um, something else pretty. I don't know flowers.

And then we went to the Christmas Eve potluck. Last year there wasn't enough food and Michael didn't get any dinner. (That's partly why we brought a ham this year.) This year there was plenty, and we feasted on turkey and ham and smoked gouda mac and cheese and horseradish scalloped potatoes and tzimmes and all kinds of miscellaneous side dishes and desserts. And Alex actually ate food instead of just running around being hysterically excited. (Colin had a jar of pureed turkey-apple-cranberry holiday dinner, because I fall for marketing tricks like that.)

And we went home and put the kids to bed and hauled presents out of hiding places and wrapped a few things and hung candy canes on the tree from Santa and I lost one of Colin's stocking presents. And poured ourselves glasses of red wine and curled up on the couch to watch the first-season West Wing Christmas episode, "In Excelsis Deo," except that Colin kept waking up and finally we went to bed without finishing it.

Christmas Eve was good. The pageant was wonderful. We have amazing, amazing kids at our church. Is it too early to start worrying about what story we'll do next year?

Today was the first rehearsal for this year's Christmas pageant. We're doing The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, which was originally a book by Barbara Robinson. The story is about a family of horrible awful juvenile delinquent kids who muscle in on a church Christmas pageant, take over all the roles, and wind up Teaching Everyone A Lesson About Christmas. Yeah, I know. But it's going to be fun. The kids are really excited.

This year we're going with simplicity. Most of the exposition comes from a narrator, a teenage boy who will be reading from the script. A teenage girl plays the mother who gets roped into directing the pageant, and she also has a fair number of lines. The younger kids (who play the rest of the roles) have just a manageable few lines each.

The thing that's really ideal about this story, at least from my standpoint as the director, is that the play-within-a-play aspect means that I don't have to worry about the little kids learning where to go and what to do. If they need to be herded around the stage by adults or they wander off or whisper to each other? It'll just pass as realism. And I do have reasonably sharp kids in the key child roles.

Against my better judgment, I gave Alex a speaking part. She really, really, really wanted to be Gladys Herdman, the youngest delinquent kid, who winds up with the part of the Angel of the Lord in the pageant. She has one line, which she delivers at two different points: "Hey! Unto you a child is born!" Hopefully she will manage it all right. I painted a vivid verbal picture of how she'll have to deliver her line in a church full of people she doesn't know, and she insisted that she could. Cross your fingers for us.

Also, as if that weren't enough, I am gearing up to teach OWL again. OWL is the UU comprehensive sex education curriculum. It's a 27-session course aimed at grades 7-9, or about ages 12-14, and covering everything from the mechanics of the reproductive system to equal rights for GLBT people to dating and relationships to what people do when they have sex. It's intense, and fun, and draining, and awesome.

Neither of my two previous co-teachers are repeating. Instead I'll be teaching with my friend Laura and with Michael. Michael! Will be teaching OWL! Which means that we are going to need childcare for OWL every week, unfortunately. But Michael was the only likely male volunteer, and you can't have OWL with only female teachers. And Michael will be great.

We have parent orientation this coming week (twice - once Tuesday evening, and once Saturday morning) and then we start with the kids on January 5. Whew.

I think that this year's Christmas pageant is going to be The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

It feels a little bit like cheating to use a ready-made story, but realistically speaking I am not going to have time to dream up an original script this fall. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever already has a reasonably UU sensibility, and someone else has already cut down a script that I can adapt. And I think the kids will have fun with it.

Merry Christmas! I'm sitting here waiting for Alex to wake up. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around? [Edited to add: and then she woke up, and I finished this later, after presents - about which, more later.]

Look, look, you can see our Christmas pageant!!

Christmas Pageant 2008 from Becky Brooks on Vimeo.

A million thanks to

unodelman for taping and to

acceberskoorb for getting it posted right away. It's quite hard to hear them, although basking in their cuteness is easy enough. Here's the script for reference in case you can't bear to miss a single nuance of my brilliant writing. ;-)

The pageant went beautifully last night. It's amazing how much more quickly everything goes when you're not able to stop the kids and give them directions. But they did great! As anticipated, the doves were pretty much incapable of remembering what to do, but they were so cute that it wasn't a problem. I just feel lucky that none of them cried and refused to go onstage. I'm so very proud of all the kids.

The closing words for the service were Jo's lovely poem about the diversity of animals attending the Nativity. What a perfect match for both our pageant and the principle of Universalism.

Afterward, we herded the kids into the RE rooms to get their costumes off, and

acceberskoorb utterly floored me by presenting me with a gift: a gorgeous picture book with an expanded version of the Friendly Beasts carol. Signed by all the kids. I don't know how she did that without me noticing, but there inside the front cover are all these carefully printed or I-just-learned-cursive-inscripted messages and names. I cried.

Also, each family got a card with a beautiful little pageant ornament: a picture of their kid(s) from dress rehearsal night, cut to ornament size and laminated. Unbelievable. When did she find time to do that?!

It was really a perfect service. It was so lovely.

unodelman's Christmas pageant dress rehearsal pictures are here. And they're awesome.

Alex is fast asleep, hopefully to stay that way until morning. At the NP's advice, we added some Vicks medicated stuff (camphor, I guess) to her hot-steam vaporizer in hopes of suppressing her cough. I wedged her door almost-closed with her sweater, to try to keep in more of the steam. Also at the NP's advice, we sprayed saline mist into her nose in large quantities. Poor kid. Although, man, do I ever appreciate the difference between a three-and-a-half-year-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old. She hated the saline spray, but she submitted.

Today I made three more pans of pumpkin-cranberry-pecan bars and also two pans of cornbread for Michael's work lunch tomorrow. (He's cleaning up my baking mess in return, so I consider it an equitable trade.) Tomorrow I don't have to bake anything. On Christmas Eve I am planning to make two pecan pies for the church potluck. I tried to convince myself that no one would expect me to bring anything to the potluck because I was directing the pageant, but I didn't believe me, so: pies. My compromise is using storebought crust. I can't believe how far I've fallen, except that this is the same kind of crust that I used for the baby shower quiches and they were tasty, so it's hard to bring myself to feel the proper amount of shame.

This evening was the dress rehearsal for the Christmas pageant. ( Read more... )

If you are going to be in Baltimore, or near Baltimore, on Christmas Eve, I really hope you'll consider attending our Christmas pageant, at the First Unitarian Church on Charles and Franklin Streets, at 6pm. Because it is going to be purely amazing. Really. It's going to be magic.

( Read more... )

I think we're mostly done with our Christmas shopping. Whew. I confess that I wasn't really feeling it this year. I think we've done wonderfully well for Alex, but for most of the other people on my list I have felt much less inspired than usual.

Alex is getting ( cut in case you'd rather be surprised on Christmas morning )

We went to the mall today to get the last things on our list. I had casually mentioned to Alex that sometimes one of Santa's helpers is at the mall and that kids can sit on his lap and talk to him. She's shy enough that I didn't want to give it a lot of build-up or put pressure on her to sit on his lap, but she was enthusiastic about the idea. And despite my carefully-laid groundwork about "Santa's helpers," as soon as she caught a glimpse of him she absolutely, positively believed that he was the real Santa.

He was a nice guy. The whole setup was designed to sell expensive photo packages, and I wasn't sure what kind of reception we would get when we said Alex just wanted to meet Santa. But he held her on his lap and chatted with her for two or three minutes. He told her that the last time he saw her she was fast asleep, thanked her for the cookies we'd left out, asked if she wanted anything in particular for Christmas, and (when she was tongue-tied) promised to pick out a special surprise just for her. He was really sweet. And the beard was real, which is not a feature I remember from my own childhood visits to Santa. I was very pleased, and so was Alex.

While we were at the mall, we bought her a little Nativity set. With the Christmas pageant and all, she's been deeply interested in the story of Baby Jesus. She's had an endless appetite for Christmas carols, and she has frequently suggested, "Let's put on a play. Mom can be Mary, Dad can be Joseph, Niblet can be baby Jesus, and I can be an angel!" So when we saw this little ceramic Nativity set on sale for $2.99, we had to buy it.

She played and played with it. She started by acting out the Christmas story in a fairly traditional way, but a while later we heard a shout from the playroom: "Mary to the rescue!!" When Michael went in, he saw this:

That's Mary at the wheel of the fire truck. Perched high on the ladder, still in the manger, is Baby Jesus. What do you suppose the religious significance of this is?

Today was also our second Christmas pageant rehearsal. ( Read more... )

Today was the first rehearsal for the Christmas pageant. ( Read more... )

After church today, I met with families whose kids want to be in the Christmas pageant I wrote. ( Read more... )

Okay, by request: the script for the Christmas pageant I wrote. ( Read more... )

So, I, um, I did this thing.

Last year I helped organize the early Christmas Eve service at church. It's a short service designed for families with young children who might not be able to make it through the longer 8pm service for big people. It was a lot of fun last year, and at the time I thought, "Next year, how fun would it be to have a Christmas pageant?"

So this year I, um, I wrote one.

I'm sure there are prepackaged UU Christmas pageants out there which are perfectly appropriate for religiously diverse congregations, written by people who know a lot more about what children can be gotten to perform than I do. But I was attacked by a muse. I kept thinking that the 12th century carol "The Friendly Beasts" would adapt well for children's performance, and then there was the voice of a cranky sheep in my head, and, well, suddenly there was this script, complete with a UU religious message. (Should I post the script? It's four pages.)

The idea of actually putting this thing on terrifies me.

I tried to make it simple. There are three parts with about a dozen lines each and three minimal speaking parts. There's a shared group role for kids who are very little, because I knew Alex would want to be in it and probably some of the other kids from her Sunday School class. The costumes can be very simple. The props are minimal (we need a manger and a baby doll and some fleece, and possibly some straw), and there's no need for much of a set. I made my best guesses about what will be workable for a bunch of upper-elementary kids to master in three or four rehearsals, and I think my expectations are reasonable. But honestly, I'm still terrified.

I'm going to ask one of the teens I taught last year if she'd like to be my Assistant Director. Given that I'm going to be 33 weeks pregnant on Christmas Eve, it seems wise to have a helper who can jump around and be energetic. Plus, she loves theater and she loves little kids.

I met with

acceberskoorb, our Director of Religious Education, yesterday to work out the planning. Can I just say that she's phenomenal at her job? She walked me through all the organizational details: lists of likely and possible participants, how many rehearsals we'll probably need and when we should schedule them, which kids can be counted on to memorize lines, how we'll assign parts, which members of the congregation might be counted on to sew costumes or play the guitar or or help with the singing, which kids in the youth group have talents in the visual arts and might want to paint a backdrop. It was awesome. I think pageants terrify her too, but she does a good job of hiding it.

“Why didn’t you warn me about Christmas pageants?”

Why indeed? What can you say about these pageants? What should you say? Is it fair to warn a fledgling minister? They’re like war, childbirth, and one microsecond of a holy visitation. - Carl Scovel