Ketchum: You might just learn something from Christmas programs
Our church put on its annual Sunday School Christmas program this week, and, as in every preceding year, the show came off as a smashing success.
Parents and grandparents gathered, cell-phone cameras in hand, to record the playlet for posterity. They preserved the children dressed as any number of assorted animals you might find in a first-century Palestinian barn, all marveling at the little baby lying in their manger.
The number of performers available precluded attendance of the shepherds or hosts of angels, although at least one angel came to the barn to reassure the animals that all was, indeed well, that this was a miraculous gift of God and that they got to witness it first hand.
This scene, and ones just like it, are being played out this month in the vast majority of Christian churches across the land. It is, as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” noted, “tradition.”
It took me back to when my wife and I were raising little Lutherans in the previous century. Each one of our three took part in the yearly observance, and each one played their parts well.
I recalled the year we offered the community a live manger scene outside, complete with a couple of sheep and, if memory serves, a goat and maybe a sheep dog. The details from 25 or 30 years ago have grown a little foggy, but you get the idea.
Our oldest daughter very much wanted to portray Mary. She did her best, but she didn’t get the part. I wrote about it, and it touched off something of a firestorm. “How could you do that?” she shrieked when that day’s newspaper arrived. She did not understand that a columnist’s family is always fair game. Shame on me. Bad dad.
Ah, Christmas programs. They are fun, and they help tell the age-old story. Truth be told, part of me used to wonder whether all the effort it takes to put on one of these extravaganzas was really worth it. Did the performers or the audience learn anything they didn’t already know?
I’ve come to the conclusion that these Sunday School programs are very much worth it. They are more than just play-acting. They are educational instruments for actors and audience alike, even though at the time that might not seem like it.
Every one of these young performers took away something they didn’t know about the Good News of Jesus’ arrival in Bethlehem. If nothing else, they came to realize that this Jesus came as a real life, breathing, in-the-flesh person – God incarnate.
And I think that happens no matter the age of the performers. After our church’s program, one of the young actors, age 4, decided to share a plastic bag of Cheerios her mom brought to ward off the hungries.
She very carefully went about the sanctuary offering a single Cheerio to folks of her choosing. One recipient smiled and said, “I feel like I just took communion.”
Maybe in a way, he did. Christmas miracles weren’t confined to first-century Palestine.
Whether the show goes smoothly or comes replete with hitches, it’s still worth watching. May you take in a performance at your church, and may you come away with a warm, holiday feeling.
With or without Cheerios.
Jim Ketchum is a retired Times Herald copy editor. Contact him at jeketchum1@comcast.net.
This article originally appeared on Port Huron Times Herald: Ketchum: You might just learn something from Christmas programs
