My Norwegian mother raised me and my sister with a very strict upbringing, following an uncritical and literal interpretation of the Bible (ie. the world was flat and was less than 10,000 years old) and some very bizarre rules like we couldn’t use scissors on Sunday or use eating utensils with our left hand, and the words “hate” or “shut up” were swear words that we got our mouths washed out with soap for saying. My sister and I came up with other ways to say these expressions without a mouth wash, rephrasing these words or expressions as “intensely dislike” and “fermez la bouche”. We often spoke in code to keep our communications under the radar of my mother’s limited English/French vocabulary.

My mother passed away just before the COVID pandemic from a long, lingering struggle with cancer, and her personal items were split up between me and my sister a few years later. Bitter-sweet memories from 40 years ago came rushing back when I came across a copy of a Christmas pageant I had written and directed as a teenager, packed together with old report cards, baby pictures and grade school projects.

I was quite involved with the small Lutheran church I was a member of, thanks to my mother’s insistence and the threat of a wooden spoon. Needless to say I was required to memorize Luther’s Catechism and to only read from the King James version of the Bible. Since the congregation wasn’t very large, I was regularly roped in by my Pastor and Mum’s coercion to “volunteer” for things like doing the readings, gathering offering, being an acolyte and assisting with Communion, participate in youth group events, look after the audio system and microphones, and lead Sunday School for the older kids not in Confirmation classes yet. As much as I dreaded bearing these responsibilities, I did find some joy in them and developed something of a religious zeal that matched my mother’s. Communion brought me to tears and I would experience a physical rush when we sang soaring hymns like “A Might Fortress is our God” and singing the verse, “Lord, to who shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, Halleluja!”. So when I was asked to produce the annual Sunday School Christmas Pageant, I took on the task with passion and energy, determined to come up with something new that went beyond the tired old nativity scene of shepherds with towels on their heads, cotton-ball sheep and a blonde, blue-eyed baby Jesus doll; I knew the traditional Christmas Story took liberties with what was actually in the Gospels.

After re-reading the nativity stories of Matthew and Luke, I feverishly laid in my bed at night before going to sleep, thinking about how to combine the two accounts into a single story, without any embellishments or corner-cutting that typified the “convenience over accuracy” of the Christmas pageants that I was so familiar with. For example, the Wise Men arrive at the time of Jesus’s birth in the traditional pageant, but the Gospel of Matthew indicates that the wise men appeared well after the birth of Jesus, and that they found the Holy Family in a house and not a stable. A problem I had was how to reconcile the two differing accounts into one time line, and to not bore the congregation to tears by including every verse. The Sunday School actors were few and young, and they couldn’t be expected to memorize pages of script. So I was forced to compromise thoroughness for brevity, and I had to cut out long sections of scripture and summarize disjointed passages to keep the story moving.

Another thing I wanted to accomplish with an original script was to include beautiful Christmas hymns that went beyond the standard “Joy to the World” and “Silent Night” carols we heard ad nauseam at the supermarket. The risk was that the congregation wouldn’t recognize them, but the Pastor’s wife was a very accomplished organist, so even if everyone was only stumbling along, at least the music was expertly played. I designed a multi-purpose set of tall white triangles, symmetrical and staggered; they could be side-lit in different colours, so they could be used as an inspiring background from a lowly stable or a grand palace.

What impressed me about the whole preparation and planning for the pageant was how everyone pitched in and did what I asked. The rehearsals were faithfully attended by the actors, the men built the set to my specifications, the women made elaborate costumes, and the organist practiced the rarely-heard hymns. She also typed up the whole script in her always extremely competent way she typed up and mimeographed Church bulletins every Sunday. I have included a scan of the pageant program and script in a link at the end of this post.

The big day arrived just before Christmas, and in a word, the whole thing was a bomb. The actors kept missing their cues and had to be prompted for almost every line they were supposed to have memorized. The congregation mumbled the lyrics of the unfamiliar hymns. The whole pageant ran for over a couple hours, much too long for the younger children in attendance, who were fussing and running up and down the aisles noisily. There was no triumphant finish, it just kind of fizzled out as people were just glad the ordeal was over. My sky-high expectations and perfectionism resulted in a deep disappointment that I verbalized to the Pastor when he asked me how I thought it went; I said it was “terrible”. I could tell he was a bit hurt and annoyed that I didn’t show appreciation for his and everyone involved’s support, regardless of the outcome. I felt humiliated by my failure to realize my fantasies of the infinite.

The beautiful stage ended up in a barn somewhere, and I never led a Christmas pageant again. The church went back to the easy comfort of the scripturally inaccurate version in the following pageants, the one that doesn’t try too hard to be authentic or true to the Biblical accounts. Decades later I started to read the script in that pile of my mother’s memorabilia, and I began yawning, losing interest and unable to read all the way through it. No wonder it was a flop, at least for its entertainment value. I don’t regret how I wrote and directed this pageant because I stuck to the vision of scriptural accuracy, I just regret I didn’t show more appreciation for everyone’s effort, as imperfect as it was to my teenage eyes. Perhaps someone tried to warn me it was too long and boring, but I wouldn’t have listened. We had tried something new, and hopefully some of the people involved gained a fuller understanding of these sections of the Bible and learned some new hymns. I didn’t say it then, but I’m saying it now: thank you to everyone who helped out. I was an immature teenager at the time, so please forgive my impudence and please understand that I really didn’t know what I was doing. Maybe I was just trying to appease a devoutly religious mother and I was caught up in my own self-righteous visions of perfection; I couldn’t see that I was trying to realize the impossible.

You can download the PDF copy of the entire document here. It is encrypted, and the passphrase is “scripturallyaccurate”.

Below is a Polaroid shot of the Pastor receiving a bicycle from the congregation (I think, I don’t recall exactly.) The set is in the backgraound.