Christmas Eve took forever to come for us kids, though I’m sure that it came quicker than desirable for Dad and Mom. After dinner we prepared for the Nativity. Although they adjusted over the years, the roles were reasonably fixed for quite awhile. We all knew that Kathleen would be Mary, Brad would be Joseph, and the cleanest doll in the house would be the baby. In later years Margaret and Martha took the part of Mary, and Jon and David tried their hand at Joseph. The littlest kids were usually the shepherds, wearing robes and towels on their heads. At least one year they tried to get Herman the cat to be their sheep. Doug was a dramatic and brooding Herod. I was the angel—probably because I had the speaking part memorized: “Fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy…”. Dad was the narrator, but it seems that he doubled as a wiseman. Mom was the director and costume coordinator. She was probably the only one who actually “watched” the pageant, as everyone else was in it, but that only seems fair when she did most of the preparation for the play, as well as the rest of Christmas. It was her small compensation for a daunting task.
After the play we gathered around the Christmas tree, for “as the wisemen brought gifts to the baby Jesus, and Heavenly Father gave us his Son, so we give gifts to each other”. Mom and Dad usually specified the one gift we could open on Christmas Eve—often new pj’s. Although I was young, I remember showing off my new nightgown on one Christmas Eve in California, only to be surprised that everyone else’s pj’s matched my red and white candy-striped nightie. Taking our first gift of Christmas with us, we lined up according to age and marched upstairs singing “Holly Bows Are Arching”
What happened after we went to bed remains a mystery to this day, for although I have been the parent doing the last-minute Christmas Eve prep, mine has been for a family of five, not ten. I don’t know how it was done in one night, and then how Dad and Mom managed to wake up and function the next morning.
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