Christmas Eve Chaos

I really set myself up this time.

Our 11:00pm Christmas Eve service will be a traditional warm wonderful old-fashioned Christmas Eve, with lots of Christmas carols to sing and everyone lighting a candle as we sing “Silent Night.”

I’ve done that kind of service before and I know it will be great. It’s the 7:00 children’s service that I don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into.

The plan – and it’s too late to back out because we’ve already advertised it – is to put on an impromptu, unrehearsed Christmas pageant involving every child in the building who wants to take part. Instead of a sermon, I’ll call all the kids up front. I’ll read sections of the Christmas story from a children’s Bible, then we’ll stop and assign parts and hand out costumes (I hope we’ll have enough) and tell the kids what to say and walk them through it. Then I’ll read the next section and we’ll do it again.

It may be total chaos, but I don’t think so. I think it will be a lot of fun, for the kids and everybody watching.

And of course we’ll sing Christmas carols and the children’s choir will sing and we’ll have a birthday cake for Jesus and the usual things.

I think there are lots of parents out there who would like their children to have the chance to participate in a Christmas pageant, but they haven’t gotten them into rehearsals and so on. I hope those folks will hear about this and bring their kids and it will be an easy, fun way for the whole family to be involved in a part of Christmas that is not about shopping and Santa Claus.

Speaking of events that don’t involve shopping and Santa Claus, our Night in Bethlehem this past Sunday evening was incredible. The auditorium was transformed into Bethlehem Main Street. There were about eight decorated shops where kids could put on costumes and make toys and rope and bread and sandals and jewelry and eat figs and dates and olives and such. Shopkeepers and townsfolk and a tax collector and a Roman soldier in costume interacted with visitors. We even had a before-and-after Mary and Joseph: for the first two hours one of our pregnant couples played the part, then they went out and one of our just-had-a-baby couples replaced them. We had about 115 people register for the “census” as they came in. The men did a great job building the shops. People are already planning for how to do it even better next year.

So that’s over and it went great. I have no worries about the traditional candlelight Christmas Eve service at 11:00pm. But at 7:00, inviting all the kids up and getting them to put on the service, that’s a new one. But I think it will be fun. At least it will be memorable!