A Christmas pageant of our own …
The holiday season is a busy time of year for most of us. But, here, at our house, we decided in the midst of all the holiday chaos to make some small repairs in the front area of our building (the coatroom of our old schoolhouse turned into a township zoning office and an upholstery shop). Or course, that area is where we have stored things over the years - lots of things. So, guess what - we have to clear the items in order to make repairs. Easy enough - right? Not so.
As we clean, we are discovering many long lost treasures. One of those is a box of photos and slides, once belonging to my parents. Curious, we tried looking at them by holding the slides up to the light. It works … but only minimally so. What to do? I quickly ordered a slide converter and two days later we were viewing slides. Many of the slides are in poor condition but one of those slides brought back one of my favorite memories of the holiday season —
Our parents were often subjected to one of our performances - a music concert, a dance contest, or a play. At Christmas time we re-enacted the nativity scene. We also participated in the Christmas program at church, spending a lot of time learning to recite our part of the program. Evidently that wasn’t enough for us, however, as we carefully planned and presented the Christmas story with the script taken directly from the Bible passages.
The production even included our very primitive version of lighting technology. We used my magnajector (which projected photos onto a wall or screen) and the colored saran wrap from our popcorn balls (which came in our bag of treats from the church program) to produce colored lighting for each scene. One of us (kids) was chosen to be in charge of production; the rest were actors.
The program always ended with animated applause and a chorus of “Merry Christmas” from all of the actors. What a wonderful memory.
May you fondly remember past Christmases and continue making new memories to cherish.
