The Rev. Ann R. Lougee
December 30, 2007
"From the Mouths of Babes"

On this Sunday after Christmas, when many of us have been extra-busy, I've decided it's time to just relax together and enjoy excerpts from one of my favorite stories instead of a standard sermon. Having directed a dozen or so pageants myself in the past, and having thoroughly enjoyed last Sunday's pageant here, I look forward to re-reading this little book, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson. I've had to use just parts of it in the interest of time, but there's lots of other wonderfully funny stuff I've had to leave out, so if you've never read it yourself, please do.

The story has the flavor of middle-America, suburban life in the 1950's. The church in the story can be pictured as a large, stone edifice with a long center aisle and choir lofts above the chancel. The narrator is an upper-elementary-school-aged girl whose mother takes charge of her church's pageant one year, when the usual directress, Mrs. Armstrong, has broken her leg. The young narrator says:

Our Christmas pageant isn't what you'd call four-star entertainment. Mrs. Armstrong breaking her leg was the only unexpected thing that ever happened to it.

The script is standard (the inn, the stable, the shepherds, the star), and so are the costumes, and so is the casting. Primary kids are angels; intermediate kids are shepherds; big boys are Wise Men; Elmer Hopkins, the minister's son, has been Joseph for as long as I can remember; and my friend Alice Wendleken is Mary because she's so smart, so neat and clean, and, most of all, so holy-looking.

All the rest of us are the angel choir, lined up according to height because nobody can sing parts. . . it's always just the Christmas story, year after year, with people shuffling around in bathrobes and bedsheets and sharp wings.

But this particular year, something unexpected does happen, because of the arrival of the Herdman family:

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. . .

They were just so all-around awful you could hardly believe they were real: Ralph, Imogene, Leroy, Claude, Ollie, and Gladys--six skinny, stringy-haired kids all alike except for being different sizes and having different black-and-blue places where they had clonked each other. . .

They didn't know where their father was or anything about him, because when Gladys was two years old he climbed on a railroad train and disappeared. Nobody blamed him.

Mrs. Herdman ... worked double shifts at the shoe factory, and wasn't home much... So the Herdmans pretty much looked after themselves. Ralph looked after Imogene, and Imogene looked after Leroy, and Leroy looked after Claude, and so on down the line. . . the big ones taught the little ones everything they knew . . . and the proof of that was that the meanest Herdman of all was Gladys, the youngest.

We figured they were headed straight for hell, by way of the state penitentiary. . . until they got themselves mixed up with the church, and my mother, and our Christmas pageant.

It was a whopper of a lie told by the narrator's little brother, Charlie, that caused the Herdmans to show up in church:

For three days in a row Leroy Herdman stole the dessert from Charlie's lunch box and finally Charlie just gave up trying to do anything about it. "Oh, go on and take it," he said. "I don't care. I get all the dessert I want in Sunday school." ... "Who gives it to you?" Leroy wanted to know. "The minister," Charlie said. He didn't know who else to say.
 

And so it was that the Herdmans came "slouching into Sunday School, eyes peeled for refreshments," the day when the announcement was made that rehearsals would begin soon for the Christmas pageant.

All of a sudden Imogene Herdman dug me in the ribs with her elbow. She has the sharpest elbows of anybody I ever knew. "What's the pageant?" she said. "It's a play," I said, and Imogene looked interested for the first time that day (except when she saw the collection basket) . . .

"What's the play about?" Imogene asked. "It's about Jesus," I said. "Everything here is," she muttered, so I figured Imogene didn't care much about the Christmas pageant. But I was wrong.

The next Sunday, something entirely unforeseen happened when the narrator's mother, attempting to cast the pageant parts, said:

"Now, we all know what kind of person Mary was. She was quiet and gentle and kind, and the little girl who plays Mary should try to be that kind of person. I know that many of you would like to be Mary in our pageant, but of course we can only have one Mary. So I'll ask for volunteers, and then we'll all decide together which girl should get the part."

That was pretty safe to say, since the only person who ever raised her hand was Alice Wendleken. But Alice just sat there, chewing on a piece of her hair and looking down at the floor. . .and the only person who raised her hand this time was Imogene Herdman.
 

The rest of the parts all went the same way, with nobody but Herdmans volunteering to play any of the main roles: Ollie, Claude and Leroy were to be the wise men, and Gladys would play the Angel of the Lord.
What had happened, of course, was that the Herdmans had threatened terrible things to anyone else who might challenge them for the parts, so no one dared speak up.

Well, the whole church, and even townspeople who didn't belong to the church, were all in an uproar when the news got out, and a great deal of telephoning went on. The call from Mrs. Armstrong lamenting that this never would have happened if she hadn't broken her leg made the narrator's mother all the more determined to go ahead with the pageant, Herdmans and all...

. . .and for another thing, Reverend Hopkins got fed up with all the complaints and told everybody where to get off. Of course, he didn't say "Go jump in the lake, Mrs. Wendleken," or anything like that. He just reminded everyone that when Jesus said "Suffer the little children to come unto me" Jesus meant all the little children, including Herdmans. . . ...the next Wednesday we started rehearsals. . . and there they sat, the closest thing to criminals that we knew about, and they were going to represent the best and most beautiful.

The thing was, the Herdmans didn't know anything about the Christmas story. . . Mother said she had better begin by reading the Christmas story from the Bible. This was a pain in the neck to most of us because we knew the whole thing backward and forward and never had to be told anything except who we were supposed to be, and where we were supposed to stand.

". . .Joseph and Mary, his espoused wife, being great with child. . ." "Pregnant!" yelled Ralph Herdman. Well, that stirred things up. All the big kids began to giggle and all the little kids wanted to know what was so funny, and Mother had to hammer on the floor with a blackboard pointer. "That's enough, Ralph," she said, and went on with the story.
 

"I don't think it's very nice to say Mary was pregnant," Alice whispered to me. "But she was," I pointed out. In a way, though, I agreed with her. It sounded too ordinary. Anybody could be pregnant. "Great with child" sounded better for Mary.

"I'm not supposed to talk about people being pregnant." Alice folded her hands in her lap and pinched her lips together. "I'd better tell my mother."

"Shut up," (said Imogene) "I want to hear her,"... and when Mother read about there being no room at the inn, Imogene's jaw dropped and she sat up in her seat. "My God!" she said. "Not even for Jesus?" I saw Alice purse her lips together so I knew that was something else Mrs. Wendleken would hear about--swearing in the church. . .

"What was that they laid the baby in?" Leroy said. "That manger. . .is that like a bed? Why would they have a bed in the barn?" "That's just the point," Mother said. "They didn't have a bed in the barn, so Mary and Joseph had to use whatever there was. What would you do if you had a new baby and no bed to put the baby in?" "We put Gladys in a bureau drawer," Imogene volunteered.

"Well, there you are," Mother said, blinking a little. "You didn't have a bed for Gladys so you had to use something else."

Oh, we had a bed," Ralph said, "only Ollie was still in it and he wouldn't get out. He didn't like Gladys." He elbowed Ollie. "Remember how you didn't like Gladys?" I thought that was pretty smart of Ollie, not to like Gladys right off the bat.

"And, lo, the Angel of the Lord came upon them," Mother went on, "and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and--"

"Shazam!" Gladys yelled, flinging her arms out and smacking the kid next to her.

"What?" Mother said. Mother never read "Amazing Comics."

"Out of the black night with horrible vengeance, the Mighty Marvo--"

"I don't know what you're talking about, Gladys," Mother said. "This is the Angel of the Lord who comes to the shepherds in the fields, and--"

"Out of nowhere, right?" Gladys said. "In the black night, right?"

"Well. . ." Mother looked unhappy. "In a way."

So Gladys sat back down, looking very satisfied, as if this was at least one part of the Christmas story that made sense to her.

"Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea," Mother went on reading, "behold there came Wise Men from the East to Jerusalem, saying--"

"That's you, Leroy," Ralph said, "and Claude and Ollie. So pay attention." ...

"They saw the young child with Mary, his mother, and fell down and worshiped him, and presented unto him gifts: gold, and frankincense and myrrh."

"What's that stuff?" Leroy wanted to know.

"Precious oils," Mother said, "and fragrant resins."

"Oil!" Imogene hollered. "What kind of a cheap king hands out oil for a present? You get better presents from the firemen!" Sometimes the Herdmans got Christmas presents at the Firemen's Party. . . I guess she figured they were better than oil.

Then we came to King Herod, and the Herdmans had never heard of him either, so Mother had to explain that it was Herod who sent the Wise Men to find the baby Jesus.

"Was it him that sent the crummy presents?" Ollie wanted to know, and Mother said it was worse than that -- he planned to have the baby Jesus put to death.

"My God!" Imogene said. "He just got born and already they're out to kill him!"

They were really interested in Herod, and I figured they liked him. He was so mean he could have been their ancestor--Herod Herdman. But I was wrong.

"Who's going to be Herod in this play?" Leroy said. "We don't show Herod in our pageant," Mother said.

And they all got mad. They wanted somebody to be Herod so they could beat up on him.

I couldn't understand the Herdmans. You would have thought the Christmas story came right out of the F.B.I. files, they got so involved in it--wanted a bloody end to Herod, worried about Mary having her baby in a barn, and called the Wise Men a bunch of dirty spies. And they left the first rehearsal arguing about whether Joseph should have set fire to the inn, or just chased the innkeeper into the next county.

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. . .

"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. . . 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. "What finally did happen to Herod, anyway?"

None of us knew. I had never thought much about Herod. He was just a name, somebody 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?" ...

At the next rehearsal. . . 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. . .

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...

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.

"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.
 

The dress rehearsal challenged Mother's ingenuity and tested her patience:
"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. . .

"Now," Mother said, "Gladys is the angel who comes to the shepherds with the news."

"Yeah," 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."

The evening of the pageant arrived, with Mother telling Father: "It may be the first Christmas pageant in history where Joseph and the Wise Men get in a fight, and Mary runs away with the baby."

. . . and at 7:30 the pageant began. . . . Ralph and Imogene ... for once didn't come through the door pushing each other out of the way. They just stood there for a minute as if they weren't sure they were in the right place -- because of the candles, I guess, and the church being full of people. They looked like the people you see on the six o'clock news -- refugees, sent to wait in some strange ugly place, with all their boxes and sacks around them.
It suddenly occurred to me that this was the way it must have been for the real Holy Family, stuck away in a barn by people who didn't much care what happened to them. They couldn't have been very neat and tidy either, but more like this Mary and Joseph (Imogene's veil was cockeyed as usual, and Ralph's hair stuck out all round his ears).

Imogene had the baby doll but she wasn't carrying it the way she was supposed to, cradled in her arms. She had it slung up over her shoulder, and before she put it in the manger she thumped it twice on the back.

I heard Alice gasp and she poked me. "I don't think it's very nice to burp the baby Jesus," she whispered, "as if he had colic." Then she poked me again. "Do you suppose he could have had colic?"

I said, "I don't know why not," and I didn't. He 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. . .

Next came Gladys, from behind the angel choir, pushing people out of the way and stepping on everyone's feet. 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.

And all the shepherds trembled, sore afraid -- of Gladys, mainly, but it looked good anyway.

. . . Then everybody in the audience shifted around to watch the Wise Men march up the aisle.

"What have they got?" Alice whispered.

I didn't know, but whatever it was, it was heavy -- Leroy almost dropped it. He didn't have his frankincense jar either, and Claude and Ollie didn't have anything although they were supposed to bring the gold and myrrh.

"I knew this would happen," Alice said for the second time. "I bet it's something awful."

"Like what?"

"Like . . . a burnt offering. You know the Herdmans."

Well, they did burn things, but they hadn't burned this yet. It was a ham -- and right away I knew where it came from...

My father was on the church charitable works committee -- they give away food baskets at Christmas, and this was the Herdmans' food-basket ham. It still had the ribbon around it, saying Merry Christmas.

"I'll bet they stole that!" Alice said.

"They did not. It came from their food basket and if they want to give away their own ham I guess they can do it."

But even if the Herdmans didn't like ham (that was Alice's next idea) they had never before in their lives given anything away except lumps on the head. So you had to be impressed.

Leroy dropped the ham in front of the manger. It looked funny to see a ham there instead of the fancy bath-salts jars we always used for the myrrh and frankincense.

And then they went and sat down in the only space that was left. While we sang "What Child is This?" the Wise Men were supposed to confer among themselves and then leave by a different door, so everyone would understand that they were going home another way.

But the Herdmans forgot, or didn't want to, or something, because they didn't confer and they didn't leave either. They just sat there, and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it.

"They're ruining the whole thing!" Alice whispered, but they weren't at all. As a matter of fact, it made perfect sense for the Wise Men to sit down and rest, and I said so. "They're supposed to have come a long way. You wouldn't expect them just to show up, hand over the ham, and leave!"

As for ruining the whole thing, it seemed to me that the Herdmans had improved the pageant a lot, just by doing what came naturally -- like burping the baby, for instance, or thinking a ham would make a better present than perfumed oil.

Usually, by the time we got to "Silent Night," which was always the last carol, I was fed up with the whole thing and couldn't wait for it to be over. But I didn't feel that way this time. I almost wished for the pageant to go on, with the Herdmans in charge, to see what else they would do that was different.

Maybe the Wise Men would tell Mary about their problem with Herod, and she would tell them to go back and lie their heads off. Or Joseph might go with them and get rid of Herod once and for all. Or Joseph and Mary might ask the Wise Men to take the Christ Child with them, figuring that no one would think to look there.

I was so busy planning new ways to save the baby Jesus that I missed the beginning of "Silent Night,". . . 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 even bother to wipe them away. She just sat there -- awful old Imogene -- in her crookedy veil, crying and crying and crying. . .

Well, it was the best Christmas pageant we ever had. Everybody said so, but nobody seemed to know why.

When it was over people stood around the lobby of the church talking about what was different this year. There was something special everyone said -- they couldn't put their finger on what.

Mrs. Wendleken said, "Well, Mary the mother of Jesus had a black eye; that was something special. But only what you might expect," she added.

She meant that it was the most natural thing in the world for a Herdman to have a black eye. But actually nobody hit Imogene and she didn't hit anyone else.

Her eye wasn't really black either, just all puffy and swollen. She had walked into the corner of the choir-robe cabinet, in a kind of daze -- as if she had just caught onto the idea of God, and the wonder of Christmas.

And this was the funny thing about it all. For years, I'd thought about the wonder of Christmas, and the mystery of Jesus' birth, and never really understood it. But now, because of the Herdmans, it didn't seem so mysterious after all.

When Imogene had asked me what the pageant was about, I told her it was about Jesus, but that was just part of it. It was about a new baby, and his mother and father who were in a lot of trouble -- no money, no place to go, no doctor, nobody they knew. And then, arriving from the East (like my uncle from New Jersey) some rich friends.

But Imogene, I guess, didn't see it that way. Christmas just came over her all at once, like a case of chills and fever. And so she was crying, and walking into the furniture.

When the pageant was over, the Herdmans wouldn't take back their ham, and they wouldn't take any of the candy that was given out to all the children, either. But Imogene did ask for a set of Bible story pictures, and took out the picture of Mary and said it was just right.

The narrator concludes:

...no matter how she herself was, Imogene liked the idea of the Mary in the picture--all pink and white and pure-looking, as if she never washed the dishes or cooked supper or did anything at all except have Jesus on Christmas Eve.

But as far as I'm concerned, Mary is always going to look a lot like Imogene Herdman--sort of nervous and bewildered, but ready to clobber anyone who laid a hand on her baby. And the Wise Men are always going to be Leroy and his brothers, bearing ham.

And ... the Angel of the Lord--Gladys, with her skinny legs and her dirty sneakers sticking out from under her robe, yelling at all of us, everywhere: "Hey! Unto you a child is born!"

From the mouths of babes. Amen.