Nativity Plays

Posted by dodo

When Mary heard she was to be the mother of Jesus she went and sang the Magna Carta.

Schoolboy Common Entrance essay Christmas approaches. Realising that the children will soon be breaking up, Scarlett O’Aga steps up her panicking. Buckling under Christmas shopping, she staggers past boutiques pounding out sexy pop music, and wishes that she had a salary to blue on party glitter and was at an office party being propositioned.

Meanwhile at the office, the harassed working wife is tearing her hair. She has lost the roneoed letter about mince pies for the PTA Christmas knees-up; she’s already forgotten to make paper-chains for the children’s formrooms and to provide a pot of jam for the school Christmas Fayre (she wishes teachers would learn to spell); nor did she have time to wash her daughter’s angel dress between performances of the nativity play. She still has to pack up a bottle of wine and a herbal cushion as end-of-term presents for her children’s respective form mistresses, although from the amount of time she‘d had to take off work to look after her own children during the teacher’s strike, she feels they ought to be giving her presents.

Finally, even though she hasn’t done any Christmas shopping yet, she is trying to screw up courage to ask her boss for yet another afternoon off, this time to attend her son’s nativity play.

If she does get permission, she must turn up early to get a seat. So many children come from broken homes these days that nativity plays are packed out with both mothers and fathers turning up with new partners, and several new children.

One headmistress, anxious to fill the hall on the night, urged all the children to bring their parents, whereupon a small boy shot up his hand and asked: ‘How many parents may one bring?’

Nativity plays are hazardous affairs. The standard of acting is abysmal, the singing even worse; the curtain collapses; Joseph is always playing Jacks with the oxen or punching the shepherds when he should be making his entrance, the heavenly host either burst into tears or wave like mad when they locate their parents in the audience; the Virgin Mary’s front teeth are missing; and the innkeeper assures her that there’s buckets of room at the inn if she and Joseph are prepared to share a bathroom. But it doesn’t matter, even if the angel drips hot candle wax on the ass or the star fuses, because to the mothers and fathers their own child is the only star and its performance is bound to move them to tears.

Often the Virgin Mary’s parents are separated and acrimonious, and kick off by firmly sitting at opposite ends of the same gym bench, but are forced next to one another by lack of space. Drying each other’s tears afterwards, they often end up in the pub together.

Nativity plays tend to be very sophisticated these days, with children miming to taped songs from Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar, and some father, who’s a BBC cameraman, videoing all the tears and cock-ups for posterity.

Until a few years ago, all the children wanted to be Mary or at least the Angel Gabriel. Today, I am told, the most sought after part is Herod.

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