The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

by Barbara Robinson

  Chapter 5

  When we got home my father wanted to hear all about it.

  “Well,” Mother said, “just suppose you had never heard the Christmas story, and didn’t know anything about it, and then somebody told it to you. What would you think?”

  My father looked at her for a minute or two and then he said, “Well, I guess I would think it was pretty disgraceful that they couldn’t find any room for a pregnant woman except in the stable.”

  I was amazed. It didn’t seem natural for my father to be on the same side as the Herdmans. But then, it didn’t seem natural for the Herdmans to be on the right side of a thing. It would have made more sense for them to be on Herod’s side.

  “Exactly,” Mother said. “It was perfectly disgraceful. And I never thought about it much. You hear all about the nice warm stable with all the animals breathing, and the sweet-smelling hay—but that doesn’t change the fact that they put Mary in a barn. Now, let me tell you . . .” She told my father all about the rehearsal and when she was through she said, “It’s clear to me that, deep down, those children have some good instincts after all.”

  My father said he couldn’t exactly agree. “According to you,” he said, “their chief instinct was to burn Herod alive.”

  “No, their chief instinct was to get Mary and the baby out of the barn. But even so, it was Herod they wanted to do away with, and not Mary or Joseph. They picked out the right villain—that must mean something.”

  “Maybe so.” My father looked up from his newspaper. “Is that what finally happened to Herod? What did happen to Herod, anyway?”

  None of us knew. I had never thought much about Herod. He was just a name, some-body in the Bible, Herodtheking.

  But the Herdmans went and looked him up.

  The very next day Imogene grabbed me at recess. “How do you get a book out of the library?” she said.

  “You have to have a card.”

  “How do you get a card?”

  “You have to sign your name.”

  She looked at me for a minute, with her eyes all squinched up. “Do you have to sign your own name?”

  I thought Imogene probably wanted to get one of the dirty books out of the basement, which is where they keep them, but I knew nobody would let her do that. There is this big chain across the stairs to the basement and Miss Graebner, the librarian, can hear it rattle no matter where she is in the library, so you don’t stand a chance of getting down there.

  “Sure you have to sign your own name,” I said. “They have to know who has the books.” I didn’t see what difference it made—whether she signed the card with her own name, or signed the card Queen Elizabeth—Miss Graebner still wasn’t going to let Imogene Herdman take any books out of the public library.

  I guess she couldn’t stop them from using the library, though, because that was where they found out about Herod.

  They went in that afternoon, all six of them, and told Miss Graebner that they wanted library cards. Usually when anybody told Miss Graebner that they wanted a library card, she got this big happy smile on her face and said, “Good! We want all our boys and girls to have library cards.”

  She didn’t say that to the Herdmans, though. She just asked them why they wanted library cards.

  “We want to read about Jesus,” Imogene said.

  “Not Jesus,” Ralph said, “that king who was out to get Jesus . . . Herod.”

  Later on Miss Graebner told my mother that she had been a librarian for thirty-eight years and loved every minute of it because every day brought something new and different. “But now,” she said, “I might as well retire. When Imogene Herdman came in and said she wanted to read about Jesus, I knew I’d heard everything there was to hear.”

  At the next rehearsal Mother started, again, to separate everyone into angels and shepherds and guests at the inn but she didn’t get very far. The Herdmans wanted to rewrite the whole pageant and hang Herod for a finish. They couldn’t stand it that he died in bed of old age.

  “It wasn’t just Jesus he was after,” Ralph told us. “He killed all kinds of people.”

  “He even killed his own wife,” Leroy said.

  “And nothing happened to him,” Imogene grumbled.

  “Well, he died, didn’t he?” somebody said. “Maybe he died a horrible death. What did he die of?”

  Ralph shrugged. “It didn’t say. Flu, I guess.”

  They were so mad about it that I thought they might quit the pageant. But they didn’t—not then or ever—and all the people who kept hoping that the Herdmans would get bored and leave were out of luck. They showed up at rehearsals, right on time, and did just what they were supposed to do.

  But they were still Herdmans, and there was at least one person who didn’t forget that for a minute.

  One day I saw Alice Wendleken writing something down on a little pad of paper, and trying to hide it with her other hand.

  “It’s none of your business,” she said.

  It wasn’t any of my business, but it wasn’t any of Alice’s, either. What she wrote was “Gladys Herdman drinks communion wine.”

  “It isn’t wine,” I said. “It’s grape juice.”

  “I don’t care what it is, she drinks it. I’ve seen her three times with her mouth all purple. They steal crayons from the Sunday-school cupboards, too, and if you shake the Happy Birthday bank in the kindergarten room it doesn’t make a sound. They stole all the pennies out of that.”

  I was amazed at Alice. I would never think to go and shake the Happy Birthday bank.

  “And every time you go in the girls’ room,” she went on, “the whole air is blue, and Imogene Herdman is sitting there in the Mary costume, smoking cigars!”

  Alice wrote all these things down, and how many times each thing happened. I don’t know why, unless it made her feel good to see, in black and white, just how awful they were.

  Since none of the Herdmans had ever gone to church or Sunday school or read the Bible or anything, they didn’t know how things were supposed to be. Imogene, for instance, didn’t know that Mary was supposed to be acted out in one certain way—sort of quiet and dreamy and out of this world.

  The way Imogene did it, Mary was a lot like Mrs. Santoro at the Pizza Parlor. Mrs. Santoro is a big fat lady with a little skinny husband and nine children and she yells and hollers and hugs her kids and slaps them around. That’s how Imogene’s Mary was—loud and bossy.

  “Get away from the baby!” she yelled at Ralph, who was Joseph. And she made the Wise Men keep their distance.

  “The Wise Men want to honor the Christ Child,” Mother explained, for the tenth time. “They don’t mean to harm him, for heaven’s sake!”

  But the Wise Men didn’t know how things were supposed to be either, and nobody blamed Imogene for shoving them out of the way. You got the feeling that these Wise Men were going to hustle back to Herod as fast as they could and squeal on the baby, out of pure meanness.

  They thought about it, too.

  “What if we didn’t go home another way?” Leroy demanded. Leroy was Melchior. “What if we went back to the king and told on the baby—where he was and all?”

  “He would murder Jesus,” Ralph said. “Old Herod would murder him.”

  “He would not!” That was Imogene, with fire in her eye, and since the Herdmans fought one another just as fast as they fought everybody else, Mother had to step in and settle everyone down.

  I thought about it later though and I decided that if Herod, a king, set out to murder Jesus, a carpenter’s baby son, he would surely find some way to do it. So when Leroy said, “What if we went back and told on the baby?” it gave you something to think about.

  No Jesus . . . ever.

  I don’t know whether anybody else got this flash. Alice Wendleken, for one, didn’t.

  “I don’t think it’s very nice to talk about the baby Jesus being murdered,” she said, stitching her lips together and looking sour. That was one more thing to write d
own on her pad of paper, and one more thing to tell her mother about the Herdmans—besides the fact that they swore and smoked and stole and all. I think she kept hoping that they would do one great big sinful thing and her mother would say, “Well, that’s that!” and get on the telephone and have them thrown out.

  “Be sure and tell your mother that I can step right in and be Mary if I have to,” she told me as we stood in the back row of the angel choir. “And if I’m Mary we can get the Perkins baby for Jesus. But Mrs. Perkins won’t let Imogene Herdman get her hands on him.” The Perkins baby would have made a terrific Jesus, and Alice knew it.

  The way things stood, we didn’t have any baby at all—and this really bothered my mother because you couldn’t very well have the best Christmas pageant in history with the chief character missing.

  We had lots of babies offered in the beginning—all the way from Eugene Sloper who was so new he was still red, up to Junior Caudill who was almost four (his mother said he could scrunch up). But when all the mothers found out about the Herdmans they withdrew their babies.

  Mother had called everybody she knew, trying to scratch up a baby, but the closest she came was Bernice Watrous, who kept foster babies all the time.

  “I’ve got a darling little boy right now,” Bernice told Mother. “He’s three months old, and so good I hardly know he’s in the house. He’d be wonderful. Of course he’s Chinese. Does that matter?”

  “No,” Mother said. “It doesn’t matter at all.”

  But Bernice’s baby got adopted two weeks before Christmas, and Bernice said she didn’t like to ask to borrow him back right away.

  So that was that.

  “Listen,” Imogene said. “I’ll get us a baby.”

  “How would you do that?” Mother asked.

  “I’ll steal one,” Imogene said. “There’s always two or three babies in carriages outside the A&P supermarket.”

  “Oh, Imogene, don’t be ridiculous,” Mother said, “You can’t just walk off with somebody’s baby, you know!” I doubt if Imogene did know that—she walked off with everything else.

  “We just won’t worry anymore about a baby,” Mother said. “We’ll use a baby doll. That’ll be better anyway.”

  Imogene looked pleased. “A doll can’t bite you,” she pointed out. Which just went to prove that Herdmans started out mean, right from the cradle.

  Chapter 6

  Our last rehearsal happened to be the night before the pot-luck supper, and when we got there the kitchen was full of ladies in aprons, counting out dishes and silverware and making applesauce cake for the dessert.

  “I’m sorry about this,” one of the ladies told Mother, “but with so much to do at this time of year, the committee decided to come in this evening and set up the tables and all. I just hope we won’t bother you.”

  “Oh, you won’t,” Mother said. “We won’t be in the kitchen. You won’t even know we’re here.”

  Mother was wrong—everybody in that end of town knew we were there before the evening was over.

  “Now, this is going to be a dress rehearsal,” Mother told us all, and right away three or four baby angels began hollering that they forgot their wings. Half the angel choir had forgotten their robes, and Hobie Carmichael said he didn’t have any kind of a costume.

  “Wear your father’s bathrobe,” Charlie told him. “That’s what I do.”

  “He doesn’t have a bathrobe.”

  “What does he hang around the house in?”

  “His underwear,” Hobie said.

  I looked at Alice Wendleken to see if she was going to write that down on her pad of paper, but Alice was standing all by herself in a corner, patting her hair. Her hair was all washed and curled, and her robe was clean and pressed. She had even put vaseline on her eyelids, so they would shine in the candlelight and everyone would say “Who is that lovely girl in the angel choir? Why isn’t she Mary?” I guess Alice was afraid to move, for fear she might spoil herself.

  “Don’t worry about your wings,” Mother said. “The main point of a dress rehearsal isn’t the costumes. The main point is to go right straight through without stopping. And that’s what we’re going to do, just as if we were doing it for the whole congregation. I’m going to sit in the back of the church and be the audience.”

  But it didn’t work that way. The baby angels came in at the wrong place and had to go back out again, and a whole gang of shepherds didn’t come in at all, for fear of Gladys. Imogene couldn’t find the baby Jesus doll, and wrapped up a great big memorial flower urn in the blanket, and then dropped it on Ralph’s foot. And half the angel choir sang “Away in a Manger” while the other half sang “O, Little Town of Bethlehem.”

  So we had to start over a lot.

  “I’ve got the baby here,” Imogene barked at the Wise Men. “Don’t touch him! I named him Jesus.”

  “No, no, no.” Mother came flying up the aisle. “Now, Imogene, you know you’re not supposed to say anything. Nobody says anything in our pageant, except the Angel of the Lord and the choir singing carols. Mary and Joseph and the Wise Men make a lovely picture for us to look at while we think about Christmas and what it means.”

  I guess Mother had to say things like that, even though everybody knew it was a big lie. The Herdmans didn’t look like anything out of the Bible—more like trick-or-treat. Imogene even had on great big gold earrings, and she wouldn’t take them off.

  “Now, Imogene,” Mother said. “You know Mary didn’t wear earrings.”

  “I have to wear these,” Imogene said.

  “Why is that?”

  “I got my ears pierced, and if I don’t keep something in ’em, they’ll grow together.”

  “Well, they won’t grow together in an hour and a half,” Mother said.

  “No . . . but I better leave ’em in.” Imogene pulled on her earrings, which made you shudder—it was like looking at the pictures in National Geographic of natives with their ears stretched all the way to their shoulders.

  “What did the doctor say about leaving something in them?” Mother said.

  “What doctor?”

  “Well, who pierced your ears?”

  “Gladys,” Imogene said.

  That really made you shudder—the thought of Gladys Herdman piercing ears. I thought she probably used an ice pick, and for the next six months I kept watching Imogene, to see her ears turn black and fall off.

  “All right,” Mother said, “but we’ll try to find something smaller and more appropriate for you to wear in the pageant. Now we’ll start again and go right straight through, and—”

  “I think I ought to tell them what his name is,” Imogene said.

  “No. Besides, you remember it wasn’t Mary who named the baby.”

  “I told you!” Ralph whacked Imogene on the back. “I named him.”

  “Joseph didn’t name the baby either,” Mother said. “God sent an angel to tell Mary what his name should be.”

  Imogene sniffed. “I would have named him Bill.”

  Alice Wendleken sucked in her breath, and I could hear her scratching down on her pad of paper that Imogene Herdman would have called the baby Bill instead of Jesus.

  “What angel was that?” Ralph wanted to know. “Was that Gladys?”

  “No,” Mother said. “Gladys is the angel who comes to the shepherds with the news.”

  “Yeh,” Gladys said. “Unto you a child is born!” she yelled at the shepherds.

  “Unto me!” Imogene yelled back at her. “Not them, me! I’m the one that had the baby!”

  “No, no, no.” Mother sat down on a front pew. “That just means that Jesus belongs to everybody. Unto all of us a child is born. Now,” she sighed. “Let’s start again, and—”

  “Why didn’t they let Mary name her own baby?” Imogene demanded. “What did that angel do, just walk up and say, ‘Name him Jesus’?”

  “Yes,” Mother said, because she was in a hurry to get finished.

  But Alice Wend
leken had to open her big mouth. “I know what the angel said,” Alice piped up. “She said, ‘His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.’”

  I could have hit her.

  “My God!” Imogene said. “He’d never get out of the first grade if he had to write all that!”

  There was a big crash at the back of the church, as if somebody dropped all the collection plates. But it wasn’t the collection plates—it was Mrs. Hopkins, the minister’s wife, dropping a whole tray of silverware.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was just passing by, and I thought I’d take a peek . . .”

  “Would you like to sit down and watch the rehearsal?” Mother asked.

  “No-o-o.” Mrs. Hopkins couldn’t seem to take her eyes off Imogene. “I’d better go check on the applesauce cake.”

  “You didn’t have to say that,” I told Alice. “All that about Wonderful, Everlasting Father, and all.”

  “Why not?” Alice said, patting her hair. “I thought Imogene wanted to know.”

  By that time everyone was hot and tired, and most of the baby angels had to go to the bathroom, so Mother said we would take a five-minute recess. “And then we’ll start over,” she said, looking sort of hopeless, “and go right straight through without stopping, won’t we?”

  Well, we never did go right straight through. The five-minute recess was a big mistake, because it stretched to fifteen minutes, and Imogene spent the whole time smoking cigars in one of the johns in the ladies’ room. Then Mrs. Homer McCarthy went to the ladies’ room and opened the door and smelled something funny and saw some smoke—and she ran right to the church office and called the fire department.

  We were singing “Angels We Have Heard on High” when what we heard was the fire engine, pulling up on the lawn of the church, with the siren blaring and the red lights flashing. The firemen hurried in and made us all go outside, and they dragged a big hose in the front door and went looking for a fire to put out.

  The street was full of baby angels crying, and shepherds climbing all over the fire truck, and firemen, and all the ladies on the pot-luck committee, and neighbors who came to see what was going on, and Reverend Hopkins who ran over from the parsonage in his pajamas and his woolly bathrobe.