In the nights leading up to last Christmas, I read Barbara Robinson’s The Best Christmas Pageant Ever to my daughter. She was in third grade, and I had fond memories of my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Koenigs, reading it to our class almost thirty years prior. Though I remember being skeptical when she announced the title. I’d been in Christmas pageants. What could possibly be worth writing a book about? Harried parents herding miniature bathrobe-clad shepherds and sobbing tinsel-haloed angels to the front of the church to sing “Away in a Manger” before returning to the pews for a droning, by-the-numbers message followed by more Christmas music? In my mind, a book called The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, written by an adult, was going to be a slog. I had it in my head that “best” in the eyes of an adult meant perfect, as “being good” seemed to elicit praise from adults, and any departure from that mostly got you scoldings or withered, disappointed looks at best. Sure, the book might include some minor problem that would track with reality, but it would end up being solved in a condescending or moralizing “adult” manner. There’d be nothing said that needed to be, and nothing that reflected the true messiness of life as children see it.
The book starts, “The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker’s old broken-down toolhouse.” I was immediately swayed; this wasn’t what I’d expected at all. I’m sure Mrs. Koenigs must have read it over the course of a few days, but my memory has retroactively made it feel like it was all done in one fell swoop like other books you can’t stop once started.
It’s a legitimately funny read, depicting kids (and adults) in ways that feel real in their imperfections, even when exaggerated for comic effect. Everything seems bigger and more intense to kids, because they’re constantly experiencing new things. It seemed to me back then (and is even more obvious now) that the writer actually got a kick out of these miscreants, and maybe even loved them. The narrator (the unnamed daughter of the woman who ends up having to direct the pageant) says of the children who generally make up the pageant: “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.”
There are six Herdman children: four boys (Leroy, Claude, Ollie, and Ralph), and two scene-stealing girls (Imogene and Gladys). Their father hopped on a train never to return, and their mother works double shifts at the shoe factory, so they are essentially left to their own devices most of the time. They never would have stepped foot in the church, except that the narrator’s younger brother lies to Leroy Herdman (who had been stealing his desserts), saying that he gets all the dessert he wants at Sunday school anyway. Of course, the following Sunday, the Herdman children make their way to 2nd Presbyterian.
At Sunday school, they find out about the pageant, and Imogene decides that she and her siblings are going to take all the major roles. Having never been to church, the Herdmans know nothing of the Christmas story, and when presented with it at the first rehearsal, they are completely enthralled. The other kids think hearing the story again is “a pain in the neck … because we knew the whole thing backward and forward,” but when their restlessness gets out of hand, Imogene yells at them to shut up because she wants to hear it.
Having no access to even the basic cultural Christianity of manners, morals, and traditions that many of the kids in the book grew up with, the Herdman kids come to the Christmas story without baggage. Their lack of preconceived notions help the other kids in the pageant see the story afresh. At the pageant, Imogene (as Mary) burps the baby Jesus doll, leading the narrator to the insight that Christ “could have had colic, or been fussy, or hungry like any other baby. After all, that was the whole point of Jesus — that he didn’t come down on a cloud like something out of “Amazing Comics,” but that he was born and lived … a real person.”
Gladys too, takes her role as the Angel of the Lord seriously: “Since Gladys was the only one in the pageant who had anything to say she made the most of it: ‘Hey! Unto you a child is born!’ she hollered, as if it was, for sure, the best news in the world.”
Like many Christmas pageants, the one in the book concludes with the church singing “Silent Night.” And though on last year’s reading, I was already emotionally primed by the image of a loudmouth ragtag little girl gleefully shouting the news of Christ’s birth, I wasn’t prepared for what followed:
When we got to ‘Son of God, Love’s pure light,’ I happened to look at Imogene and I almost dropped my hymn book on a baby angel.Everyone had been waiting all this time for the Herdmans to do something absolutely unexpected. And sure enough, that was what happened.
Imogene Herdman was crying.
In the candlelight her face was all shiny with tears and she didn’t bother to wipe them away. She just sat there — awful old Imogene — in her crookedy veil, crying and crying and crying … she had caught on to the idea of God, and the wonder of Christmas … Christmas just came over her all at once, like a case of chills and fever.
“Awful old Imogene” is changed by an encounter with the living God through the ordinary means of acting out the Christmas story. This newfound faith, reckoned to her as righteousness, allows Imogene to see herself in the young woman God chose to bear the Incarnate Word. Seeing that maybe Mary wasn’t chosen for being “quiet and dreamy and out of this world,” or for any other pre-existing quality, but purely out of God’s love for her, gave Imogene hope for her own life.
Up to that point, I think my assumptions about adults had extended to assumptions about God. Because I thought adults wanted perfect kids, I wondered if God also favored the perfect and blemish-free. Leaving me and everyone I knew out. But, if the creator of this book was able to love the flawed characters she’d created, maybe adults could love actual flawed children, and maybe God, who created all of us, already did.
Sometimes in parenting I fall back on the same easy moralizing I couldn’t stand as a kid, and honestly still despise, “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate,” (God help me) especially when I’m stressed about work or money, or I’m tired, or otherwise just feeling low. Perhaps it is the curse of parenting to fail to retain the lessons we learned in our own childhood. So often, the necessity of the moment is the enemy of patient love. But as imperfect as I might be as a parent, at least I know there is a book I can read to my daughter at Christmas that might be used to break down the wall of criticism and cantankerousness I constantly build between us, revealing, in love’s pure light, my God-given heart beating for her underneath.
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5 responses to “Love’s Pure Light: Christmas with the Herdmans”
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“…and maybe God, who created all of us, already did.” Love it, and thank you for introducing me to the book!
Wonderful, thank you! I’m 37, and my Dad reading this book aloud as the rest of us decorate the tree (he doesn’t enjoy decorating) is my absolute favorite tradition that we still do every year.
Thanks, Josh. Merry Christmas to you!
Bronwen, I’m also 37, and it gives me such hope to know that maybe when my daughter is 37 she’ll still want me to (or at least let me) still read this. Merry Christmas!
[…] Love’s Pure Light: Christmas With the Herdmans — Joey Goodall read The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson to his daughter. He discovered something new about parenting and God. […]
[…] Love’s Pure Light: Christmas with the Herdmans: “Having no access to even the basic cultural Christianity of manners, morals, and traditions that many of the kids in the book grew up with, the Herdman kids come to the Christmas story without baggage.” […]