Are your school days out of sight? When you took English, art, and math. What's your favorite Fahrenheit? How sour are the grapes of wrath? Do you need a challenger? Poor disgusting Salinger. Do you love the written word? What happened to the mocking? Our show is just beginning, so find a place to sit. These questions will be on the test. It's time for Sophomore Lit.
to one of our annual Christmas episodes. And as is tradition by now, I'm joined by my lovely wife, Marina McCoy. Hi, it's nice to be here, John. Thanks for having me on your podcast again. This year, when we were looking around for something to read for Christmas, I had suggested this book, which is The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. written in 1972 by Barbara Robinson. And hand to God, I did not know that they were about to make a movie of this. I brought it up because this was a book that...
I knew from my childhood but had not read from my childhood. It was a book that we had a copy of in the house. I believe my elder brother Rob may have read it or Dan may have read it. But I do know that... Sometime around sixth grade or so, everyone in my class was reading this and they were all talking on and on about how great this book was. I don't remember. I believe that probably at that time.
I was probably thinking that I was a little too old for this book. And so I never got around to reading it until just now. Right. So I have never heard of this book. Nor did I read it growing up. So this is a first read for me. And I thought it was pretty good. I mean, I enjoyed it. I don't think I have the same feeling about it that someone might have had a...
about the book if they had read it as a kid and had nostalgic feelings. But I think it had a good theological core for the most part, which is the part that interested me. It's always fun to see like what... the 1970s were like it was based in the 70s this would take place in the 70s or just written in the 70s john i i believe it's supposed to be contemporary in the in the time that it was written yeah so i mean the things that i thought were kind of fun so of course christmas pageants
are still like this. Our own kids were in Christmas pageants when they were children. And just as they say in the book, there's a kind of social hierarchy to what takes place in your sort of traditional church Christmas pageant. Um, As they say that the primary kids are angels. It's a quote from the book. Intermediate kids are shepherds. Big boys are wise men. The minister's son has been Joseph for as long as the narrator can remember.
Their friend Alice is married because she's smart, so neat and clean, and most of all, so holy looking. Right. This is a book that's formed as a remembrance. In much the way that, say, A Child's Christmas in Wales is a remembrance story. This is a story of... Probably someone closer to childhood, though, maybe only a couple of years out. The way that the voice is written, the main character, her name is Beth. She talks about the story of this.
one Christmas pageant. And like A Child's Christmas in Wales, I feel like there's a lot of emphasis placed upon the... town characters, the town traditions, trying to paint a picture of small town America. But as you say, it's in the early 70s, you know, we kind of expect that kind of Christmas story thing for story. set in, I don't know, the 1890s, the 1940s, 50s.
This feels like it's sort of on the verge of the contemporary era to me. But there still are a lot of silly things in this, such as the bad kids in town. They're bad because they smoke cigars. Yes, I thought that was amusing, too. So the for people who haven't read the book, but might be listening along the gist of the story is that there's a Christmas pageant that's held every year. And the narrator, her mother is going to.
to be in charge of it for the first time this year. I think the mom is going to do it because someone else is in the hospital. And so the usual social hierarchy kind of breaks down. And for a variety of reasons, including being strong-armed. Out of it, the usual Mary is not going to be Mary, the usual girl who always has the role. And instead, members of the Herdman family who are kind of known for being the scoundrel or rascal kids. And I say scoundrel or rascal because...
Here's what are some of the things that make them quote unquote bad kids in that day. In one chapter, it says, I'd heard Imogen Herdman telling Alice what would happen to her if she dared to volunteer. This means like volunteer to be merry this year. Here again, all the ordinary.
everyday herdman things like clonking you on the head and drawing pictures all over your homework papers and putting worms in your coat pocket. I feel like that's a kind of 1970s thing, right? Because I don't really remember any stories of our kids having worms stuck in their pockets or the terrible tragedy of someone else drawing a picture on your homework.
But but, you know, it seems like there are a lot of stories that involve worms and their misuse. And we were kids like how to eat fried worms. Yeah, definitely. Definitely that that I thought of that, too. What I what I also thought was funny was. There's a weird disconnect, I feel, between the levels of badness of these kids. On one hand, they're considered bad because they swear.
And they smoke cigars. On the other hand, they're considered bad because they commit harsin. And that does seem like a pretty bad thing to me. Yeah, it's weird because the book opens with that and the adults seem remarkably... unperturbed by the kids catching fire by the chem lab they're using. The adults are like, ah, you know, no, no problem. But they do seem really like, you know, there seems to be a worried here. The Herdman kids might not be.
good performers in the Christmas pageant or yeah, might, there's another threat for someone that they're going to stick a pussy willow so far down your ear, nobody can reach and it will sprout and grow and grow. And I feel like that's just not like a contemporary threat, you know, in the school system today that makes you worry about the school to prison pipeline.
You know, a lot of this book takes place in the church where they are practicing the pageant and then eventually where they perform the pageant. It is an unapologetically Christian Christmas story. And the descriptions of Sunday school and of the activities church around Christmastime. really jogged my memory because I grew up the son of a minister and...
Christmas was a very busy time around the church. And I remember lots of activities around the church. I remember going to Sunday school classes. I did not... ever take part in a Christmas pageant though. No, I didn't know that. That's interesting. Our kids both did. I remember, you know, when Jim was little being an angel, right? And I sewed him some kind of...
Really makeshift, because I'm not a sewer, much of a sewer, makeshift little wings onto his outfit. Maybe he was a star when he was really small and he graduated to angel way back in the day. Did you ever want to be in a Christmas pageant? And if you did, what part did you want? If you were going to be in a Christmas pageant as a kid, what part would you have played? You know, as a kid, I remember feeling that the church I was in, in Eureka.
This was where my father was not the minister. We had moved there after my father switched to becoming a professor of theology.
I kept thinking that the church should put on a Christmas pageant, but that was more because I had all these ideas about what childhood should or shouldn't be from the books that I had read. And so I thought... Like peanuts? Yeah, like, well, peanuts, like... reading things like Henry Reed or Homer Price, I had this this vision of small town America as being this quaint place full of. of stuff that didn't actually, you know, that's part of what led me to become a paper boy.
One of the last paper boys in America was this idea that that was what we were supposed to do as a kid. And I also had a brief stint in the Boy Scouts, but that. that ended, I found it a little bit too much. Yeah, well, I was a Girl Scout. I enjoyed that, but I did not have a chance to be a paper girl, which, you know, I did. I also had read those stories about how...
Somehow you can make a lot of money as a paperboy or by selling Grit magazine. So, yeah, so I like this. You know, I'll tell you what I thought was good about this story. What I thought was good about this story was the kind of core ethic of this story is about. You know, what was the first Christmas really like and a kind of contrast that keeps happening throughout the book between the perfect.
image, I guess, what people think a perfect image of Christmas would be, like who should be the perfect Placid Mary. And then the reality of that first Christmas, which of course was people who were... Forced to go to a census in Bethlehem. And that's probably a... literary story anyway by Luke, but a story about people who are an unwed mother, you know, who is with this husband, not kind of sure what's happening with her pregnancy, fleeing to another town, you know, doing so in faith, but.
with a lot of unusual circumstances surrounding the nature of that family, not being able to find housing. And there's some nice moments in the book where... They kind of interject things like, so the kid, the Herdman kids apparently are regularly visited by child welfare because.
there's a lack of confidence in whether their parents are taking good care of them. Well, the father has left and the mom. She's taken two jobs to take care of them. Yeah. And there's a kind of like social feeling around the town that maybe they should go on some more welfare so she can stay home more.
the kids but she wants to work her two jobs and um but they're like there's a moment in the book where uh they learn the kids didn't know what a manger was they don't understand what swaddling is that's all being explained to them and when they're told Wait, a manger is a feed box. One of the kids asks, wait a minute. They tied him up. They tied up the baby Jesus, swaddling him, and put him in a feed box. Where was child welfare?
And that seems just like a throwaway joke, but in fact, it's a really acute theological question about, you know, so Jesus wasn't born into a wealthy family, into perfect circumstances, and that's, you know, not where God comes to be. And so the kids are asking the right questions about the Jesus story, though none of the adults are really fully aware of this, at least not at first. It's played for laughs at first, but then it becomes, I think, more and more sincere as it goes along.
lack of understanding of the Christmas story, or in fact, anything biblical, or anything to do, I guess, with religion. gives them a perspective that is untainted by the familiarity of the season. And at first that's... played up as sort of funny, but as time goes on, the characters, certainly the narrator, but all the characters around are invited to reconsider their preconceptions of all these things through the eyes of absolute beginners in a way.
There's a moment in the play where they're talking about Herod and who's going to be Herod in the play. And the kids are really interested in Herod because he's this kind of violent king and they're fascinated with the more interesting story figure. And the mother says, don't show Herod in our pageant, they all get mad because they just wanted to have Herod to like beat up on, it says. But they're kind of right because in the gospel according to Matthew, Herod is really mentioned as...
this threatening figure that eventually leads Joseph and Mary to have to flee into Egypt. And there's all these resonances with Old Testament texts, Hebrew Bible texts. But the long, the short of it is there. It is important to the Christ child story in both the Luke account and the Matthew account that he's not being born into a perfect world. And he's certainly not being born into.
an ideal situation. And yet the Christmas pageants are always trying to present everything as highly, highly idealized and peaceful. Right. I mean, when you think about it, A Christmas pageant is sort of simply a life-size creche with real people in it. And the description of the... of the model that the narrator and all these people have in their heads is of kids being angelic and cherubic on stage.
largely meaning not talking a lot. Yeah, there's a point where it says someone's asking like, well, what does Mary say in the play? And the... director of the play says, oh, well, Mary and Joseph and the wise men make a lovely picture for us to look at while we think about Christmas and what it means. But in fact,
And it says, and then it says shortly afterwards, the author here says that Herdman's didn't look anything like out of the Bible, more like trick or treat, you know? So the point is that if... You could do a Christmas pageant differently. And in fact, I think if you remember years ago, John, the church that we went to years ago, there was a pageant where it was Catholic.
parish that had the kids who are playing the shepherds be like people who are homeless because it represented the fact that the shepherds would have been the poorest of the poor coming to see the Christ child. and really emphasized, you know, that Mary was... kind of like looking for a place to stay and how hard it was for them to find it and that there are people today who search for shelter. So I've certainly seen Christmas pageants that have done a good job of making connections to
what this might have felt like in a more realistic way and the reasons we might want to keep thinking about those things today. But in the story, you know, initially the director just wants to make it look like a pretty, as you say, like a crush. Schnatterwill story. Right. And I, you know, when I started reading this, I...
I sort of clocked from the beginning that it was going to be some sort of a redemption story, that it was going to be a story where we start out with the kids who are bad. It's going to turn out that they're good by the end. But in, I think, a different kind of story. what would have happened would be the kids would be introduced to Christmas or religion or to theater, art or whatever, and they would be, they themselves would be changed. But that's not what the story really is.
story is that these outsiders come in and change the situation. It's a very short, very light, silly story in some ways. But I think that that... is the part of the story that really hits me hard. I think it does really well. Yeah, the main narrator says, for example, as she's watching this kind of production that's not going very neatly and things are in a little bit of chaos, she says, it suddenly occurred to me this was just the way it must have been for the real holy family.
family, stuck away in a barn by people who didn't much care what happened to them. They couldn't have been very neat and tidy either, but more like this Mary and Joseph. Imogen's veil was cockeyed as usual and Ralph's hair stuck out all over around his ears. Imogen had the baby doll but she wasn't carrying it the way she was supposed to cradled in her arms. And they, you know, the, I think she's.
basically burping the baby Jesus, the pretend baby Jesus, as if he has colic. And someone says, oh, you shouldn't do that. Like he had colic. And then she kind of asked the question, well, wait, could he have had colic? And of course, true, right? Probably the baby Jesus cried and, you know, got sick and had all those other human experiences because part of the idea of the Christmas story is that God becomes one of us and that.
It's a deeply incarnational story, right? Like God's truly human, not just like in a human disguise, like the Gnostics thought. So yeah, it says, yeah, he could have had cholera, could have been fussy or hungry like any other baby. That was the whole point of Jesus. He was born and lived a real person. So I think that's what we kind of see is that, you know.
The Jesus story is all about God wanting to become part of like what this world is actually like, and not us trying to force that story into some idealized version that never existed anywhere on earth. When I was looking this up, I... I was trying to find some information on this story to talk to you about why I was interested in doing it. And that's when I first saw that they were making, literally making a movie of this this year. and a theatrical release, no less. And I was a little bit...
Taken aback because this story does feel to me very much of its time, you know, in a way. And I say that in a good way, because I feel like the idea, the basic idea of. Looking towards the outsiders, even the criminal element as being a valuable source of understanding. Christmas or the human condition or however you want to put it, that feels very much of that era of change that the country was going through.
I think there are a couple of moments in the story where there's a lot of real, there are this transformation at multiple points, right? Yeah, I think it's it's not only a story about the supposedly bad kids who nonetheless like ask good questions about the Jesus story. There's also those two kind of key moments where the kids.
that are supposedly the bad kids actually show themselves to be a lot kinder and better than people think they are. At least the two places I noticed, I'll ask you where you noticed that I... I thought that when they obviously they put the ham in. to donate it where they, you know, they're given a donation hand because they're food insecure. And then there's a moment where you can come up and offer the baby Jesus a gift and they offer him the ham. It's a very touching moment.
because it's kind of all they have and has that, I guess, kind of classic part of the Christmas story of giving God everything we have and helping those who are poorer than ourselves. And then the moment where Imogen cries and she just sort of breaks down. She's been kind of mean to some of the other characters and she'd sort of stolen the married character out of the other girl's tradition of playing it.
partly through threatening her and she kind of breaks down and cries and softens. I don't know. Where did you see that kind of thing in the kids or did you? I agree with both those points. I think that, yes, this is a story. This is a story about transformation of the six, the six Herman kids. But, you know, I when I say it's not simply that I think that's because it. It is...
a bit richer than simply being about their growth. It's about the... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I totally agree with that. I was just saying, it's, you know, it's interesting that it's a both and, you know, it's both about how the kids change through learning more about the story. And I think maybe understand that they have a place in the story, you know, like they kind of make connections between themselves and those figures. And that's what allows them to have access to.
The religious part, which they hadn't really cared about before. But, you know, it is funny because if you think about... this story compared to, say, A Christmas Carol, which is probably the most famous story about someone being transformed by the season. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is reintroduced to his childhood.
and become and softens and becomes kind and recognizes a certain debt he owes to his fellow humans. But it's not as though Scrooge... comes around and also teaches everyone else in the book the value of... proper bookkeeping or something like that. The Herdmans in this story actually do, I think, change the other town's members for the better. In that, at least, I think this...
Gets a point up. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's a great point that like their transformation and the town's transformation kind of go together near the end of the book. It says, Imogen liked the idea of Mary in the picture, all pink and white and pure looking as though she never washed the dishes or cooked supper or did anything at all except have Jesus on Christmas Eve.
But as far as I'm concerned, the narrator says, Mary is always going to look a bit like Imogen Herdman, sort of nervous and bewildered, but ready to clobber anyone who would lay a hand on her baby. And the wise men are always going to be Leroy and his brothers Baringham. I have a question for you. Sure. So neither of us has seen the movie. I have no idea what happens in the movie or how they take this story and turn it into one.
What do you think? I don't have any idea. You can't ask me this question. Haha, I got to it first. What do you think they should do for the movie? I have no idea. Well, I mean, I feel like they're going to have to update what the... Herdman's due that is bad. It's going to have to be something like they they write something nasty on someone else's Instagram or something like that. That's a good one. Instead of like writing, drawing bad pictures on their homework or. Yeah. Or maybe maybe.
They use like a chat GBT or AI to cheat on a math test or something like that. I understand this book has been in print. since it was published, and it is something of a perennial favorite. Since I am not a theist myself, what touched me most about the story was that this was a story of outsiders being invited into a community and becoming part of that community and the community realizing that the outsiders had something to teach them.
That feels to me like a message that is really, really needed right now. So if the movie can convey that, I would be glad. Yeah, that's true. And that is, you know, part of the Christmas story is the Jesus and the first people who see Jesus are, you know, of course, Joseph. But then the shepherds who were. kind of nobody's in society and they get welcomed into this place, which becomes a place special because of who is there. And that's a beautiful message.
Do you want to say anything else or are we going to end there? Happy Christmas. Happy, happy Christmas. The Incomparable Podcast Network. Become a member and support this show today. TheIncomparable.com slash members.