Shepherds and sheep in the pageant

I was in my first ever Christmas pageant a couple weeks ago, as part of the Cathedral’s pageant.  I was a shepherd.

It was about the first Christmas pageant I can remember even remember seeing, and certainly the first one I had ever been a part of.  I grew up Unitarian Universalist, and I suppose the Christmas pageant is not something UUs do that much.  In any event, as far as I can remember, we never had a Christmas pageant in my church when I was a kid.  The Episcopal church I was going to in college had a pageant, but it was always close enough to Christmas that it was after our semester was over and we’d gone home for the holidays.

One of the three kings comes

So there I was, grown up and an intern and everything, and I suddenly had to learn all these mysteries about exactly who all the people in the Christmas pageant are, and what shepherds wear, and whether they can wear their shoes or not.  Being a shepherd is fortunately not difficult.  I am not exactly sure what happened before we got on the scene, but by the time we arrived, Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus were already there in Bethlehem.  We came in and sat at some distance until the angels came.  Once they came and stood behind the scene, we followed them to the holy family.  We then waited while the three kings came with their gifts, concluding the pageant.

Guests and volunteers at dinner

On Christmas Eve, Holy Trinity had another dinner for its neighbors, with a Christmas party.  We served dinner to a small army of volunteers and to somewhere between 45 and 65 of our neighbors.  There were so many people walking around and coming and going that it was hard to keep an accurate count of them!  We had our Christmas Eve service at 4 that afternoon, and as soon as the church service was over, around 5:15, we started welcoming people into the parish hall.  We had dinner around 6.  For dinner, we served ham, yams, peas and mushrooms, jello salad, and rolls and for dessert we had chocolate and vanilla cake with candy canes.

Santa was here

After dinner, Santa came in (well, really Dennis, who is one of our volunteers, dressed in a Santa suit) and the kids put on a Christmas pageant, which was narrated by our vicar, Paul.  The pageant was pretty low key: the kids were in costume, but there was no rehearsal or anything.  They just followed (or not) the promptings of the narrator, which included instructions like “the shepherds went past the coffee pitchers and down to Bethlehem.”

Mary and Joseph in the Pageant

The audience thought these instructions were pretty funny, so it worked well.  At the end of the pageant, Santa gave presents, including gift bags, lunch boxes, and art sets, out to all the kids.  We also had gift bags for the adults, which we gave out after the kids got their presents, along with donated clothing and shoes.

To prepare for the dinner and the party, we wrapped presents on the Saturday before.  Our kitchen leader, Mahli, spent days baking all the cakes ahead of time and then freezing them.  On the Tuesday before the dinner, we got together and prepared the jello salad and frosted and cut the cakes.  We also counted out the tableware and went over the schedule for the flow of the evening.  All this planning ahead meant we had much less prep work to do on the day of the dinner, which made the evening go more smoothly.  This was a good idea because it made it easier to feed as many people as we had, and still have time for the volunteers to attend the church service.