Why We Wrote It

We have run the children's Christmas program at our church, Valle Verde United Methodist here in Las Cruces, since 1991. It's a small church. On a good Sunday we have about ninety in the pews, and in December anywhere from eight to twenty children who are willing to put on a bathrobe in front of their grandparents. Robert carries mail for a living and Connie manages a school cafeteria, so between us we know a good deal about early mornings, cold weather and getting a lot of children to do the same thing at the same time.

For our first six years we used a script that had been in the church office since about 1974. It was a mimeographed copy of a copy, and by 1996 you could barely read the purple. The shepherds in it said "Lo!" eleven times, and the children had no idea what they were saying, and neither, honestly, did we. That December our son, who was eleven and playing a shepherd, asked Connie at rehearsal, "What's a lo?" and she didn't have a good answer.

So over Thanksgiving weekend of 1997 we sat down at the kitchen table and wrote our own. Robert wrote the shepherds, because he knows what it's like to be out in the weather before the sun's up while everybody else is asleep, and how the people who do that kind of work talk to each other. Connie wrote the angel who has never delivered a message before, and the sheep who keeps wandering off, because in every Christmas program we've ever done there has been one little sheep who would not stay put, and we decided to stop fighting it and write her in. Our pastor, Rev. Evelyn Moon, read it and laughed in the right places, and made sure we had the story straight. We put it on that December, and again last year.

We thought that was the end of it. But a family visiting from Wisconsin took a copy home in 1997, and their church did it the next year, and someone there sent it to someone else, and we started getting letters. Then e-mails. When our nephew set us up with this page in January, we'd already mailed out over thirty copies at the post office counter. Now you can just print it.

How to Use It

It's free. Any church, school, Sunday school, scout troop or family that wants to put it on may print it, copy it and perform it, as many times as you like. You don't need to ask. Please don't sell it, and please leave our names on the script.

Change it to fit your children. If you have a boy who wants to be the New Angel, change "she" to "he." If you have twelve sheep, have twelve sheep. If your Hungry Shepherd needs fewer lines, give some to someone else. Every year we've done it, our script has been different by the time we got to Christmas, and so should yours be. The one thing we'd ask is that you keep the Bible story itself the way Luke tells it. We've told it in our own words, but we've been careful not to add to it.

Please e-mail us when you do it. It isn't required, but it is the best part of this for us. Tell us where you are, when you put it on, and who played Pepita. We keep a list on the refrigerator, and every December we read it out loud at our own dress rehearsal so our children know that kids in other places are wearing bathrobes too. [email protected]

Casting

The play works with as few as eight children and as many as twenty. Speaking parts are for children who can read well and won't freeze; the non-speaking parts are for the littlest ones, who are usually the stars of the show anyway. Ages are only a guide. Our best Old Shepherd was eight.

With only 8 children: one Narrator, the Head, Young and Old Shepherds (the Young Shepherd takes the Hungry Shepherd's lines), the New Angel, Mary, Joseph and Pepita. A grown-up reads the Senior Angel from behind the screen, and the congregation is the angel choir. It works fine. Our first year we had nine.

With 20: two Narrators splitting the scenes, all four shepherds, both angels, Mary, Joseph, the Star, Pepita, and four or five each of sheep and little angels.

Where It's Been Done

From your letters and e-mails, so far:

• Our own church, Las Cruces, New Mexico: Sunday, December 21, 1997, and Sunday, December 20, 1998
• A Lutheran church in Wisconsin, 1998 (the family who started all this)
• Two Methodist churches in Texas, one in El Paso and one in the Hill Country, 1998
• A Presbyterian church in Alamogordo, New Mexico, 1998
• A Christian school in Arizona, 1998, with forty children; they had four Pepitas
• A Baptist church in Oregon, 1998, where the stepladder was replaced by a hay wagon

And for this December, eleven churches have written so far, in nine states. Thank you, all of you. We pray for every one of your programs by name.

Our Own Cast

Our son Hunter was a shepherd in the old play and the first Head Shepherd in this one. He's fourteen now and runs the lights. Our older daughter, Jennifer, was the first New Angel, and Connie admits she wrote the part with Jennifer's stage fright in mind; she got through it, and she was wonderful. She's twelve now and has asked to be a Narrator this year, which we think is about right. Our youngest, Kelsey, was the first Pepita. She was eight, which is old for a sheep, but she's small, and she wandered beautifully. This year she wants to be the Hungry Shepherd. We'll see.