The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (2 page)

Now and then you'd see Mrs. Herdman, walking the cat on a length of chain around the block. But she worked double shifts at the shoe factory, and wasn't home much.

My mother's friend, Miss Philips, was a social-service worker and she tried to get some welfare money for the Herdmans, so Mrs. Herdman could just work one shift and spend more time with her children. But Mrs. Herdman wouldn't do it; she liked the work, she said.

“It's not the work,” Miss Philips told my mother, “and it's not the money. It's just that she'd rather be at the shoe factory than shut up at home with that crowd of kids.” She sighed. “I can't say I blame her.”

So the Herdmans pretty much looked after themselves. Ralph looked after Imogene, and Imogene looked after Leroy, and Leroy looked after Claude and so on down the line. The Herdmans were like most big families—the big ones taught the little ones everything they knew . . . and the proof of that was that the meanest Herdman of all was Gladys, the youngest.

We figured they were headed straight for hell, by way of the state penitentiary . . . until they got themselves mixed up with the church, and my mother, and our Christmas pageant.

Chapter 2

M
other didn't expect
to have anything to do with the Christmas pageant except to make me and my little brother Charlie be in it (we didn't want to) and to make my father go and see it (he didn't want to).

Every year he said the same thing—“I've seen the Christmas pageant.”

“You haven't seen this year's Christmas pageant,” Mother would tell him. “Charlie is a shepherd this year.”

“Charlie was a shepherd last year. No . . . you go on and go. I'm just going to put on my bathrobe and sit by the fire and relax. There's never anything different about the Christmas pageant.”

“There's something different this year,” Mother said.

“What?”

“Charlie is wearing your bathrobe.”

So that year my father went . . . to see his bathrobe, he said.

Actually, he went every year but it was always a struggle, and Mother said that was her contribution to the Christmas pageant—getting my father to go to it.

But then she got stuck with the whole thing when Mrs. George Armstrong fell and broke her leg.

We knew about this as soon as it happened, because Mrs. Armstrong only lived a block and a half away. We heard the siren and saw the ambulance and watched the policemen carry her out of the house on a stretcher.

“Call Mr. Armstrong at his work!” she yelled at the policemen. “Shut off the stove under my potatoes! Inform the Ladies' Aid that I won't be at the meeting!”

One of the neighbor women called out, “Helen, are you in much pain?” and Mrs. Armstrong yelled back, “Yes, terrible! Don't let those children tear up my privet hedge!”

Even in pain, Mrs. Armstrong could still give orders. She was so good at giving orders that she was just naturally the head of anything she belonged to, and at church she did everything but preach. Most of all, she ran the Christmas pageant every year. And here she was, two weeks before Thanksgiving, flat on her back.

“I don't know what they'll do now about the pageant,” Mother said.

But the pageant wasn't the only problem. Mrs. Armstrong was also chairman of the Ladies' Aid Bazaar, and coordinator of the Women's Society Pot-luck Supper, and there was a lot of telephoning back and forth to see who would take over those jobs.

Mother had a list of names, and while she was calling people about the Ladies' Aid Bazaar, Mrs. Homer McCarthy was trying to call Mother about the pot-luck supper. But Mrs. McCarthy got somebody else to do that, and Mother got somebody else to do the bazaar. So the only thing left was the Christmas pageant.

And Mother got stuck with that.

“I could run the pot-luck supper with one hand tied behind my back,” Mother told us. “All you have to do is make sure everybody doesn't bring meat loaf. But the Christmas pageant!”

Our Christmas pageant isn't what you'd call four-star entertainment. Mrs. Armstrong breaking her leg was the only unexpected thing that ever happened to it. The script is standard (the inn, the stable, the shepherds, the star), and so are the costumes, and so is the casting.

Primary kids are angels; intermediate kids are shepherds; big boys are Wise Men; Elmer Hopkins, the minister's son, has been Joseph for as long as I can remember; and my friend Alice Wendleken is Mary because she's so smart, so neat and clean, and, most of all, so holy-looking.

All the rest of us are the angel choir—lined up according to height because nobody can sing parts. As a matter of fact, nobody can sing. We're strictly a no-talent outfit except for a girl named Alberta Bottles, who whistles. Last year Alberta whistled “What Child Is This?” for a change of pace, but nobody liked it, especially Mrs. Bottles, because Alberta put too much into it and ran out of air and passed out cold on the manger in the middle of the third verse.

Aside from that, though, it's always just the Christmas story, year after year, with people shuffling around in bathrobes and bedsheets and sharp wings.

“Well,” my father said, once Mother got put in charge of it, “here's your big chance. Why don't you cancel the pageant and show movies?”

“Movies of what?” Mother said.

“I don't know. Fred Stamper has five big reels of Yellowstone National Park.”

“What does Yellowstone National Park have to do with Christmas?” Mother asked.

“I know a good movie,” Charlie said. “We had it at school. It shows a heart operation, and two kids got sick.”

“Never mind,” Mother said. “I guess you all think you're pretty funny, but the Christmas pageant is a tradition, and I don't plan to do anything different.”

Of course nobody even thought about the Herdmans in connection with the Christmas pageant. Most of us spent all week in school being pounded and poked and pushed around by Herdmans, and we looked forward to Sunday as a real day of rest.

Once a month the whole Sunday school would go to church for the first fifteen minutes of the service and do something special—sing a song, or act out a parable, or recite Bible verses. Usually the little kids sang “Jesus Loves Me,” which was all they were up to.

But when my brother Charlie was in with the little kids, his teacher thought up something different to do. She had everybody write down on a piece of paper what they liked best about Sunday school, or draw a picture of what they liked best. And when we all got in the church she stood up in front of the congregation and said, “Today some of our youngest boys and girls are going to tell you what Sunday school means to them. Betsy, what do you have on your paper?”

Betsy Cathcart stood up and said, “What I like best about Sunday school is the good feeling I get when I go there.”

I don't think she wrote that down at all, but it sounded terrific, of course.

One kid said he liked hearing all the Bible stories. Another kid said, “I like learning songs about Jesus.”

Eight or nine little kids stood up and said what they liked, and it was always something good about Jesus or God or cheerful friends or the nice teacher.

Finally the teacher said, “I think we have time for one more. Charlie, what can you tell us about Sunday school?”

My little brother Charlie stood up and he didn't even have to look at his piece of paper. “What I like best about Sunday school,” he said, “is that there aren't any Herdmans here.”

Well. The teacher should have stuck with “Jesus Loves Me,” because everybody forgot all the nice churchy things the other kids said, and just remembered what Charlie said about the Herdmans.

When we went to pick him up after church his teacher told us, “I'm sure there are many things that Charlie likes about Sunday school. Maybe he will tell you what some of them are.” She smiled at all of us, but you could tell she was really mad.

On the way home I asked Charlie, “What are some of the other things you like that she was talking about?”

He shrugged. “I like all the other stuff but she said to write down what we liked best, and what I like best is no Herdmans.”

“Not a very Christian sentiment,” my father said.

“Maybe not, but it's a very practical one,” Mother told him—last year Charlie had spent the whole second grade being black-and-blue because he had to sit next to Leroy Herdman.

In the end it was Charlie's fault that the Herdmans showed up in church.

For three days in a row Leroy Herdman stole the dessert from Charlie's lunch box and finally Charlie just gave up trying to do anything about it. “Oh, go on and take it,” he said. “I don't care. I get all the dessert I want in Sunday school.”

Leroy wanted to know more about that. “What kind of dessert?” he said.

“Chocolate cake,” Charlie told him, “and candy bars and cookies and Kool-Aid. We get refreshments all the time, all we want.”

“You're a liar,” Leroy said.

Leroy was right. We got jelly beans at Easter and punch and cookies on Children's Day, and that was it.

“We get ice cream, too,” Charlie went on, “and doughnuts and popcorn balls.”

“Who gives it to you?” Leroy wanted to know.

“The minister,” Charlie said. He didn't know who else to say.

Of course that was the wrong thing to tell Herdmans if you wanted them to stay away. And sure enough, the very next Sunday there they were, slouching into Sunday school, eyes peeled for the refreshments.

“Where do you get the cake?” Ralph asked the Sunday-school superintendent, and Mr. Grady said, “Well, son, I don't know about any cake, but they're collecting the food packages out in the kitchen.” What he meant was the canned stuff we brought in every year as a Thanksgiving present for the Orphans Home.

It was just our bad luck that the Herdmans picked that Sunday to come, because when they saw all the cans of spaghetti and beans and grape drink and peanut butter, they figured there might be some truth to what Charlie said about refreshments.

So they stayed. They didn't sing any hymns or say any prayers, but they did make a little money, because I saw Imogene snake a handful of coins out of the collection basket when it went past her.

At the end of the morning Mr. Grady came to every class and made an announcement.

“We'll be starting rehearsals soon for our Christmas pageant,” he said, “and next week after the service we'll all gather in the back of the church to decide who will play the main roles. But of course we want every boy and girl in our Sunday school to take part in the pageant, so be sure your parents know that you'll be staying a little later next Sunday.”

Mr. Grady made this same speech every year, so he didn't get any wild applause. Besides, as I said, we all knew what part we were going to play anyway.

Alice Wendleken must have been a little bit worried, though, because she turned around to me with this sticky smile on her face and said, “I hope you're going to be in the angel choir again. You're so good in the angel choir.”

What she meant was, I hope you won't get to be Mary just because your mother's running the pageant. She didn't have to worry. I didn't want to be Mary. I didn't want to be in the angel choir either, but everybody had to be something.

All of a sudden Imogene Herdman dug me in the ribs with her elbow. She has the sharpest elbows of anybody I ever knew. “What's the pageant?” she said.

“It's a play,” I said, and for the first time that day (except when she saw the collection basket) Imogene looked interested. All the Herdmans are big moviegoers, though they never pay their own way. One or two of them start a fight at the box office of the theater while the others slip in. They get their popcorn the same way, and then they spread out all over the place so the manager can never find them all before the picture's over.

“What's the play about?” Imogene asked.

“It's about Jesus,” I said.

“Everything here is,” she muttered, so I figured Imogene didn't care much about the Christmas pageant.

But I was wrong.

Chapter 3

M
rs. Armstrong
, who was still trying to run things from her hospital bed, said that the same people always got the main parts. “But it's important to give everybody a chance,” she told Mother over the telephone. “Let me tell you what I do.”

Mother sighed, and turned off the heat under the pork chops. “All right, Helen,” she said.

Mrs. Armstrong called Mother at least every other day, and she always called at suppertime. “Don't let me interrupt your supper,” she always said, and then went right ahead and did it anyway, while my father paced up and down the hall, saying things under his breath about Mrs. Armstrong.

“Here's what I do,” Mrs. Armstrong said. “I get them all together and tell them about the rehearsals, and that they must be on time and pay close attention. Then I tell them that the main parts are Mary and Joseph and the Wise Men and the Angel of the Lord. And then I always remind them that there are no small parts, only small actors.”

“Do they understand what that means?” Mother asked.

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Armstrong said.

Later Mother asked me if I knew what that meant, about small parts and small actors.

I didn't really know—none of us did. It was just something Mrs. Armstrong always said. “I guess it means that the short kids have to be in the front row of the angel choir, or else nobody can see them.”

“I thought so,” Mother said. “It doesn't mean that at all. It really means that every single person in the pageant is just as important as every other person—that the littlest baby angel is just as important as Mary.”

“Go and tell that to Alice Wendleken,” I said, and Mother told me not to be so fresh. She didn't get very mad, though, because she knew I was right. You could have a Christmas pageant without any baby angels, but you couldn't have one without a Mary.

Mrs. Armstrong knew it too. “I always start with Mary,” she told Mother over the telephone. “I tell them that we must choose our Mary carefully, because Mary was the mother of Jesus.”

“I know that,” Mother said, wanting to get off the telephone and cook the pork chops.

“Yes. I tell them that our Mary should be a cheerful, happy little girl who is unselfish and kind to others. Then I tell them about Joseph, that he was God's choice to be Jesus' father, and our Joseph ought to be a little boy . . .” She went on and on and got as far as the second Wise Man when Mother said, “Helen, I'll have to go now. There's somebody at the door.”

Actually there was somebody at the door. It was my father, standing out on the porch in his coat and hat, leaning on the doorbell.

When Mother let him in he took off his hat and bowed to her. “Lady, can you give me some supper? I haven't had a square meal in three days.”

“Oh, for goodness sake,” Mother said, “Come on in. What will the neighbors think, to see you standing out there ringing your own doorbell? And why didn't you ring the doorbell ten minutes ago?”

Mrs. Armstrong called Mother two more times that week—to tell her that people could hem up costumes, but couldn't cut them—and to tell her not to let the angel choir wear lipstick. And by Sunday, Mother was already sick of the whole thing.

After church we all filed into the back seven pews, along with two or three Sunday-school teachers who were supposed to keep everybody quiet. It was a terrible time to try to keep everybody quiet—all the little kids were tired and all the big kids were hungry, and all the mothers wanted to go home and cook dinner, and all the fathers wanted to go home and watch the football game on TV.

“Now, this isn't going to take very long,” Mother told us. My father had said it better not take very long, because he wanted to watch the football game too. He also wanted to eat, he said—he hadn't had a decent meal all week.

“First I'm going to tell you about the rehearsals,” Mother said. “We'll have our rehearsals on Wednesdays at 6:30. We're only going to have five rehearsals so you must all try to be present at every one.”

“What if we get sick?” asked a little kid in the front pew.

“You won't get sick,” Mother told him, which was exactly what she told Charlie that morning when Charlie said he didn't want to be a shepherd and would be sick to his stomach if she made him be one.

“Now you little children in the cradle room and the primary class will be our angels,” Mother said. “You'll like that, won't you?”

They all said yes. What else could they say?

“The older boys and girls will be shepherds and guests at the inn and members of the choir.” Mother was really zipping along, and I thought how mad Mrs. Armstrong would be about all the things she was leaving out.

“And we need Mary and Joseph, the three Wise Men, and the Angel of the Lord. They aren't hard parts, but they're very important parts, so those people must absolutely come to every rehearsal.”

“What if they get sick?” It was the same little kid, and it made you wonder what kind of little kid he was, to be so interested in sickness.

“They won't get sick either,” Mother said, looking a little cross. “Now, we all know what kind of person Mary was. She was quiet and gentle and kind, and the little girl who plays Mary should try to be that kind of person. I know that many of you would like to be Mary in our pageant, but of course we can only have one Mary. So I'll ask for volunteers, and then we'll all decide together which girl should get the part.” That was pretty safe to say, since the only person who ever raised her hand was Alice Wendleken.

But Alice just sat there, chewing on a piece of her hair and looking down at the floor . . . and the only person who raised her hand this time was Imogene Herdman.

“Did you have a question, Imogene?” Mother asked. I guess that was the only reason she could think of for Imogene to have her hand up.

“No,” Imogene said. “I want to be Mary.” She looked back over her shoulder. “And Ralph wants to be Joseph.”

“Yeh,” Ralph said.

Mother just stared at them. It was like a detective movie, when the nice little old gray-haired lady sticks a gun in the bank window and says “Give me all your money” and you can't believe it. Mother couldn't believe this.

“Well,” she said after a minute, “we want to be sure that everyone has a chance. Does anyone else want to volunteer for Joseph?”

No one did. No one ever did, especially not Elmer Hopkins. But he couldn't do anything about it, because he was the minister's son. One year he didn't volunteer to be Joseph and neither did anyone else, and afterward I heard Reverend Hopkins talking to Elmer out in the hall.

“You're going to be Joseph,” Reverend Hopkins said. “That's it.”

“I don't want to be Joseph,” Elmer told him. “I'm too big, and I feel dumb up there, and all those little kids give me a pain in the neck.”

“I can understand that,” Reverend Hopkins said. “I can even sympathize, but till somebody else volunteers for Joseph, you're stuck with it.”

“Nobody's ever going to do that!” Elmer said. “I even offered Grady Baker fifty cents to be Joseph and he wouldn't do it. I'm going to have to be Joseph for the rest of my life!”

“Cheer up,” Reverend Hopkins told him. “Maybe somebody will turn up.”

I'll bet he didn't think the somebody would be Ralph Herdman.

“All right,” Mother said, “Ralph will be our Joseph. Now, does anyone else want to volunteer for Mary?” Mother looked all around, trying to catch somebody's eye—anybody's eye. “Janet? . . . Roberta? . . . Alice, don't you want to volunteer this year?”

“No,” Alice said, so low you could hardly hear her. “I don't want to.”

Nobody volunteered to be Wise Men either, except, Leroy, Claude, and Ollie Herdman.

So there was my mother, stuck with a Christmas pageant full of Herdmans in the main roles.

There was one Herdman left over, and one main role left over, and you didn't have to be very smart to figure out that Gladys was going to be the Angel of the Lord.

“What do I have to do?” Gladys wanted to know.

“The Angel of the Lord was the one who brought the good news to the shepherds,” Mother said.

Right away all the shepherds began to wiggle around in their seats, figuring that any good news Gladys brought them would come with a smack in the teeth.

Charlie's friend Hobie Carmichael raised his hand and said, “I can't be a shepherd. We're going to Philadelphia.”

“Why didn't you say so before?” Mother asked.

“I forgot.”

Another kid said, “My mother doesn't want me to be a shepherd.”

“Why not?” Mother said.

“I don't know. She just said don't be a shepherd.”

One kid was honest. “Gladys Herdman hits too hard,” he said.

“Why, Gladys isn't going to hit anybody!” Mother said. “What an idea! The Angel just visits the shepherds in the fields and tells them Jesus is born.”

“And hits 'em,” said the kid.

Of course he was right. You could just picture Gladys whamming shepherds left and right, but Mother said that was perfectly ridiculous.

“I don't want to hear another word about it,” she said. “No shepherds may quit—or get sick,” she added, before the kid in the front pew could ask.

While everybody was leaving, Mother grabbed Alice Wendleken by the arm and said, “Alice, why in the world didn't you raise your hand to be Mary?”

“I don't know,” Alice said, looking mad.

But I knew—I'd heard Imogene Herdman telling Alice what would happen to her if she dared to volunteer: all the ordinary, everyday Herdman-things like clonking you on the head, and drawing pictures all over your homework papers, and putting worms in your coat pocket.

“I don't care,” Alice told her. “I don't care what you do. I'm always Mary in the pageant.”

“And next spring,” Imogene went on, squinching up her eyes, “when the pussy willows come out, I'll stick a pussy willow so far down your ear that nobody can reach it—and it'll sprout there, and it'll grow and grow, and you'll spend the rest of your life with a pussy-willow bush growing out your ear.”

You had to admire her—that was the worst thing any of them ever thought up to do. Of course some people might not think that could happen, but it could. Ollie Herdman did it once. He got this terrible earache in school, and when the nurse looked down his ear with her little lighted tube she yelled so loud you could hear her all the way down the hall. “He's got something growing down there!” she hollered.

They had to take Ollie to the hospital and put him under and dig this sprouted pussy willow out of his ear.

So that was why Alice kept her mouth shut about being Mary.

“You know she wouldn't do all those things she said,” I told Alice as we walked home.

“Yes, she would,” Alice said. “Herdmans will do anything. But your mother should have told them no. Somebody should put Imogene out of the pageant, and all the rest of them too. They'll do something terrible and ruin the whole thing.”

I thought she was probably right, and so did lots of other people, and for two or three days all anybody could talk about was the Herdmans being Mary and Joseph and all.

Mrs. Homer McCarthy called Mother to say that she had been thinking and thinking about it, and if the Herdmans wanted to participate in our Christmas celebration, why didn't we let them hand out programs at the door?

“We don't have programs for the Christmas pageant,” Mother said.

“Well, maybe we ought to get some printed and put the Herdmans in charge of that.”

Alice's mother told the Ladies' Aid that it was sacrilegious to let Imogene Herdman be Mary. Somebody we never heard of called up Mother on the telephone and said her name was Hazelbeck and she lived on Sproul Hill, and was it true that Imogene Herdman was going to be Mary the mother of Jesus in a church play?

“Yes,” Mother said. “Imogene is going to be Mary in our Christmas pageant.”

“And the rest of them too?” the lady asked.

“Yes, Ralph is going to be Joseph and the others are the Wise Men and the Angel of the Lord.”

“You must be crazy,” this Mrs. Hazelbeck told Mother. “I live next door to that outfit with their yelling and screaming and their insane cat and their garage door going up and down, up and down all day long, and let me tell you, you're in for a rowdy time!”

Some people said it wasn't fair for a whole family who didn't even go to our church to barge in and take over the pageant. My father said somebody better lock up the Women's Society's silver service. My mother just said she would rather be in the hospital with Mrs. Armstrong.

But then the flower committee took a potted geranium to Mrs. Armstrong and told her what was going on and she nearly fell out of bed, traction bars and all. “I feel personally responsible,” she said. “Whatever happens, I accept the blame. If I'd been up and around and doing my duty, this never would have happened.”

And that made my mother so mad she couldn't see straight.

“If she'd been up and around it wouldn't have happened!” Mother said. “That woman! She must be surprised that the sun is still coming up every morning without her to supervise the sunrise. Well, let me tell you—”

“Don't tell me,” my father said. “I'm on your side.”

“I just mean that Helen Armstrong is not the only woman alive who can run a Christmas pageant. Up till now I'd made up my mind just to do the best I could under the circumstances, but now—” She stabbed a meat fork into the pot roast. “I'm going to make this the very best Christmas pageant anybody ever saw, and I'm going to do it with Herdmans, too. After all, they raised their hands and nobody else did. And that's that.”

And it was too. For one thing, nobody else wanted to take over the pageant, with or without Herdmans; and for another thing, Reverend Hopkins got fed up with all the complaints and told everybody where to get off.