The Best Christmas Pageant Ever?

By Jeni Lamm

Well, I don’t know. I have witnessed a bunch of great Christmas Pageants.

As The WordPlayers prepares to open Barbara Robinson’s THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER on Dec. 14th at the Clayton Performing Arts Center on the Hardin Valley campus of Pellissippi State, Terry and I reflect on the pageants of our past.  Maybe you have similar memories…

We remember getting together with a few other families and having our young children act out all the parts of the Christmas Story. All the kids ranged in age from 2 to 8 or thereabouts. Bathrobes became tunics, hand towels headpieces, beach towels capes, and homemade crowns adorned the heads of the kings.

We didn’t have a host of angels. There were only two girls among the families and one of them had to be Mary. We tried to tell the boys that the only angels mentioned by name in the Bible had boys’ names, but it didn’t make any difference; they were having none of wings and white sheets.

Oh, were those kids cute!  The kind of cute that makes your cheeks hurt from so much smiling!

Then there were years and years that our family was a part of the Knoxville Nativity Pageant.  We loved to get to the Coliseum early so there would be plenty of time to pet the sheep and to talk to ol’ Buster, the donkey.  There’s a heavenly recipe for spiced tea that seems to have been bestowed upon the hospitality committee of that Pageant.  We loved that tea and the boys loved those Little Debbie Christmas Tree cakes.  And of course, there was the joy of getting reacquainted with all the friends that helped to make the pageant every year.  Most of those folks we only saw one week out of the year, but they were like a wonderful, huge family.

So, which was the best pageant ever for us?  We still don’t know.  Maybe it will be our upcoming production! Click here for details.  How about yours?  Stories and comments more than welcome below!