Learning Matters: Pageants can teach lessons outside of school

Last Saturday, I was at church for the opening rehearsal of the annual children’s Christmas pageant. I’ve spent the majority of my December Saturday mornings in this activity since our daughter’s first pageant appearance in the late 1980s.

A parent assistant for some years, for several a children’s choir director, I’ll be fitting costumes again this year, finding props and tending young shepherds and sheep.

As most readers of this paper probably know, Christmas pageants are traditional enactments of the Biblical story of a child born to an impoverished couple forced to take shelter in a stable. The productions usually include parts for the parents and baby (doll or live), an innkeeper or two, and those who come to witness the occasion: shepherds, angels, wise men and lots of animals.

The number of animals varies — often with the number of children to be cast — but frequently includes cows, sheep, camels and doves.

In our church, as in many others, the story is often told loosely — not necessarily Biblically — from the perspective of supposed witnesses. I’ve seen the story voiced by young angels, barn animals, mice and young shepherds confused about why they were yanked out of bed to go to town.

In some of my favorite productions, the children experienced the story following the tradition of Las Posadas and learned the lilting Venezuelan melody, “Nino Lindo.”

Another favorite was when our adult choir, a few children and soloists performed Gean Carlo Menotti’s short opera “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” It’s the tale of another poor mother and her son, who hear the Christmas story when the wise men stop at their house on their way to Bethlehem.

I heard the last act of Amahl on the car radio on my way to the pageant rehearsal last week, and I decided I ought to write a column about why I so love Christmas productions.

It’s not so much the theology. Gospel aside, Christmas pageants tell a rich drama about wealth and poverty, weakness and power, hope and fear, promise and portent. They are one of the few communal, cultural traditions in which children regularly take part. I love them as experiences in shared storytelling and for what they do for the children participating.

Children in pageant rehearsals gain ownership of a place normally run by adults and usually visited only on Sundays, “in church,” when they’re commonly asked to be on their best behavior. They learn about the back doors behind the choir loft and altar, and the mysteries hidden behind them. They gain confidence.

I remember the assurance one young girl displayed during a Sunday service following a Saturday rehearsal. Upon learning the urgent need of the girl sitting beside her, she confidently and silently led the girl up the aisle, past the scripture-reading pastor and the staring choir members, and through the side door to the chancel restroom. The girls returned to their seats with equal poise, oblivious to any embarrassment they may have caused their parents or the pastor.

Pageants are places where children, teens, and adults share story-telling together. Older children and teens often get the narrator parts or are cast as passing wise men. Parents and siblings help as prompters in the wings.

At our church, pageant graduates like our now adult children often sit in the back pews for the Christmas Eve production, happily, if irreverently, whispering at their recollections of past pageants and props gone by.

Angelica Cordova, a high school sophomore, shared what strikes her about the pageants.

“Everyone had a part. Even the older kids,” she told me. “You think you’ll grow out of it, but you really don’t.”

Pageants build memories the way I think only musical productions can, through multiple senses or “learning modalities” (as educators say) and with yearly repetition. Children read, speak, sing, feel the vibrations of the organ; they move and sometimes dance, and all in costume (good for the visual learner).

Pageant children also gain experience with the much-desired “soft skills” their future employers will expect: following directions, learning teamwork, showing up on time.

I remain committed to the policy that our schools are not the place to offer Christmas pageants or enactments of other religious traditions. At the same time, I lament that so much of what children experience throughout December is limited to the Santa-and-Rudolph story. That storyline isn’t nearly as dramatic, and it doesn’t bring people together in the same way.

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JOYLENE WAGNER is a former member of the Glendale Unified School Board. Email her at jkate4400@aol.com.