The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson

The church Christmas pageant this year looked the same. The shepherds were the usual fifth-grade Sunday School boys wrapped in dad's bathrobe tied with a rope. The Wise Men were toting the same foil-wrapped boxes. 

The Angel was wearing the same white robe and cardboard wings as last year and the year before and the year before... Baby Jesus was, as always, a Betsy-Wetsy Doll wound up in an old sheet, and the music was the kindergartners singing "O, Little Town of Bethlehem" inaudibly, yet wildly off-key. 

But this year things were different. The pageant was different 'cause of the Herdmans, a family of kids who redefine the words "mean" and "bully." There's a Herdman in every grade at the Woodrow Wilson School, so there's no escaping being spied on, picked on, punched and pinched. It used to be that you were safe at Sunday School, but that was before the Herdmans heard a rumor that you got dessert at Sunday School. So, one Sunday, all six Herdmans showed up -- scabby knees, ragged clothes, and all -- just in time to claim all the lead roles in the Christmas pageant. Maybe they won those roles by intimidation and extortion, but there they were: Mary, Joseph, the Wise Men, and The Angel. And so it sure looked like this would be the worst Christmas pageant ever... 

The thing was, the Herdmans didn't know anything about the Christmas story. They knew that Christmas was Jesus' birthday, but everything else was news to them -- the shepherds, the Wise Men, the star, the stable, the crowded inn. 

To be sure, they were their usual Herdman selves. Gladys Herdman ("The Angel") drew mustaches on the disciples' pictures in the illustrated Bibles. Ralph Herdman ("Joseph") adopted King Herod as his personal hero. Leroy Herdman ("Wise Man #2") decided to bring ham instead of frankincense; and Imogene Herdman ("Mary") scuffled with the wise men, trying to keep them away from her little baby. Oh, yeah, it looked like this was going to be a Christmas pageant that no one would ever forget. 
And that's exactly what it was. 

It did turn out to be an unforgettable Christmas pageant -- for the Sunday School kids; for their parents. But amazingly, it was unforgettable not because it was the expected Herdman-induced disaster, but because the Herdmans made everyone see the Christmas story through new eyes. Herdman eyes; eyes and ears and hearts that were hearing the story for the first time. It was fresh to the Herdman kids, and that made this story wondrous once more to all the children and all the adults who had heard it so many times that they all knew the story by heart. No, I take that back: they didn't know it by heart, they knew it by rote. 

In a strange sort of way, Barbara Robinson's The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is not actually about the meaning of Christmas -- it's about the meaning of the meaning of Christmas. Not only has Christmas been co-opted as a symbol of conspicuous consumption, but in recent years the meaning of Christmas has also been co-opted as a socio-political symbol. Even as her book approaches its 

third decade in print, Robinson's work continues to touch the minds and hearts of children (and adults). It does so by the simple act of showing us a new way to look at the Christmas story; a renewed understanding of what it might have really been like for the little family marooned in that stable two thousand-plus years ago 

At just eighty pages, this little book (which includes [in my edition, at least] a half-dozen or so charming pen-and-ink drawings by Judith Gwyn Brown) can be read aloud to your kids in one sitting -- I know; I've read it to my own "oldest fifth-grader on earth" on Christmas Eve for the past ten years or so. This is a book to share: share it with your kids, share it with your friends. But most of all, share it with your heart. 

Originally published on Epinions at www.epinions.com/user-scmrak. © scmrak, 2009 This review was borrowed from him -- he read it to me on many Christmas eves and did a far better review than I would ever do.