Lingr lyrics pagents4/1/2023 Like actors and actresses setting up before a play, we would gather into some room, throwing on our costumes as we did one final ad hoc rehearsal while watching “Charlie Brown’s Christmas,” praying ours would be more successful. We would arrive at either the church or the school an hour or so before the parents. But we easily agreed to a cease fire at the offer of hot chocolate (with whipped cream, no less!) and dessert after rehearsals, which was perpetually “in just five minutes.”įor some, the evening of a Christmas program would be among the more nerve-racking nights in their childhood. When you have 7-year-old kids on a stage or bleachers while a certain scene is rehearsed multiple times, it’s only natural their fidgeting grows into outright anxiety and impatience.Īnyone who has tried to organize a group of kids surrounded on all sides by their friends and get them to be quiet for five minutes knows what I’m talking about.Īdmittedly, I participated in several of these aforementioned revolts like a mini-Samuel Adams. those who had no speaking role whatsoever, would petition the director for a redress of grievances.Ĭonsidering that many of these rehearsals were held on Saturdays or after school, the only time we kids fully had to ourselves, this only made matters worse. Or a quasi-revolt among the “little people,” i.e. A costume that took hours of painstaking work to make would tear. One of the kids playing a lead role would get the flu. Or, the school would reuse a program from the church, but have a few parts rewritten to suit the time length or for “artistic purposes.”Īs for the third aspect, well, this is where Murphy’s Law takes effect.Įvery year some sort of mini-disaster or potential catastrophe would occur. Or they would have the same hand motions, but for separate songs. The church program would have the same instrumental songs as last year’s school program, but with slightly different lyrics. It was like some sort of convoluted algorithm. Often, my mom and our family friend would swap programs from season to season to avoid unnecessary headaches of finding a new one. But kids like me, as well as my brothers and the rest of the SAFARI kids, had to memorize the lyrics for two different programs. It was hard enough for a kid to memorize the lyrics to a list of songs for one program. It got even more confusing when I referred to the adult family friend during one of the rehearsals at church as “Mrs.,” only to be corrected for my apparently superfluous formality.įor those of you who may have never experienced all the fun and fancy free excitement of participating in a Christmas program, it inevitably involves a copious amount of three things: singing, hand motions, and unexpected near-disasters. Do kids refer to their mothers in a formal setting as “Mom,” or “Mrs.?” (answer: depends on what mood they’re in. One, having your mother as a teacher always makes the interactions strange. In fact, there was an entire gaggle of kids who went to ECS and the same church, known idiosyncratically as the SAFARI gang (it does actually stand for something). She also directs the Christmas programs, including all of mine from kindergarten up through fifth grade.Īt the same time, a close family friend, whose kids went to my school, directed the Christmas program at our church. My mother was, and continues to be, the music teacher at Eastside Christian School in Bellevue, where I attended preschool, elementary and middle school (insert jokes about private schoolers). I had what you would refer to as a “special” or “unique” childhood when it came to Christmas programs. Or at least that’s what I observed many times when I was a kid. Meanwhile, parents crowd the gym, church or vicinity with cameras and video recorders like paparazzi, eager to get their child’s 15 seconds of fame on film to use retroactively as black mail when the child is an adult yet still foolish enough to bring their date home. ‘Tis the season for Christmas pageants, those wonderfully awkward times in the holiday season when children are caroused onto intimidatingly high stages in oversized costumes and recite their memorized lines in a high-pitched voice as quickly as possible before they forget what they are supposed to say.
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