And all the shepherds trembled, sore afraid-of Gladys, mainly, but it looked good anyway. 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. Next came Gladys, from behind the angel choir, pushing people out of the way and stepping on everyone’s feet. Right away we had to sing “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night”-and we had to sing very loud, because there were more shepherds than there were anything else, and they made so much noise, banging their crooks around like a lot of hockey sticks. 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. He could have had colic, or been fussy, or hungry like any other baby. I said, “I don’t know why not,” and I didn’t. “Do you suppose he could have had colic?” “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. She had it slung up over her shoulder, and before she put it in the manger she thumped it twice on the back. Imogene had the baby doll but she wasn’t carrying it the way she was supposed to, cradled in her arms. 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 around his ears). It suddenly occurred to me that this was just 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 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.
#Love to sing while shepherds watched their flocks by night full#
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. Ralph and Imogene were there all right, only for once, they didn’t come through the door pushing each other out of the way.
I guess we would have gone on humming till we all turned blue, but we didn’t have to. “They didn’t come at all! We won’t have any Mary and Joseph-and now what are we supposed to do?” “I knew something like this would happen,” Alice Wendleken whispered to me. So we hummed and hummed and hummed, which is boring and also very hard, and before long doesn’t sound like any song at all-more like an old refrigerator. So you really had to know the words to “Away in a Manger” because you couldn’t see anything-not even Alice Wendleken’s Vaseline eyelids.Īfter that we sang two verses of “O, Little Town of Bethlehem,” and then we were supposed to hum some more “O, Little Town of Bethlehem” while Mary and Joseph came in from a side door. While we sang “Away in a Manger,” the ushers lit candles all around the church, and the spotlight came on to be the star. My father says “Away in a Manger” always starts out sounding like a closetful of mice.īut everything settled down, and at 7:30 the pageant began. The spotlight swooped back and forth and up and down till it made you sick at your stomach to look at it and, as usual, whoever was playing the piano pitched “Away in a Manger” so high we could hardly hear it, let alone sing it.
There was the usual big mess all over the place-baby angels getting poked in the eye by other baby angels’ wings and grumpy shepherds stumbling over their bathrobes.
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