Go Tell It on the Mountain: Three Christmas Pageants for Church Schools

By Gretchen Wolff Pritchard

Here are three different Christmas pageants complete with music, staging directions, scenery and costume suggestions, plus pointers about how to organize your event. The pageants are for grades K-8, but one also calls for adults and teens.

The first pageant is a traditional Nativity play with carols; the second is an adaptation in verse in the style of medieval mystery plays; and the third is a dramatized service of lessons and carols with Eucharist. Some churches adopt one pageant as an annual production; others try a different one each year.

Pageant 1: “Good News of Great Joy” – This is the simplest pageant in concept and uses the Isaiah text of the prophecies with scenes of the Annunciation, the arrival at Bethlehem, the shepherds, and the Magi. It is intended to replace the sermon or Liturgy of the Word, or stand alone.

Pageant 2 “A Child of Might” – This production is based on medieval “mystery plays” with static staging that is easier than in pageant 1. However it doe use archaic English and requires memorization. It does not include the Magi, but introduces several characters not usually found in other pageants.

Pageant 3 “People, Look East” – This version presents a dramatized service of Lessons and Carols for Advent and Christmas. It features nine scripture readings, each followed by a carol or hymn (with performance options). Children mime the readings. It is intended to be an entire Sunday liturgy (includes communion).

Go Tell It On the Mountain is also available as a downloadable product on the Church Publishing website.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Release date: Aug 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780898697322

Book preview

PREFACE

I started writing Christmas pageants when I was ten years old. I had been hospitalized for a week right after Thanksgiving, and when I came home I found my sister had had the idea of making up a Christmas play and performing it for our parents on Christmas Eve. Since I was not allowed to go back to school until January, an idea that had been hers rapidly became my project, and as the years went by, a family tradition—attended, as family traditions are, by tears, screaming matches, and power struggles as well as by treasured moments. We kept it up into our teens, with increasingly elaborate and sophisticated scripts, longer and longer carol concerts, and ornate hand-illuminated programs; and one year when it failed to jell, and we spent Christmas Eve without a family play, Christmas Eve was dismal indeed. I barked at everybody all evening and ended up being sent to my room to pull myself together. I had become an addict.

So when I became Christian Education Coordinator at a parish church, and the Sunday school parents suggested timidly, Let’s have a Christmas pageant, I took to it like a duck to water. The results, refined over the years, you now hold in your hands.

Writing Christmas pageants is educational, as my sister and I had already discovered. Having given Mary the line, How shall this be, since I have no husband? neither of us was really sure how to answer it. Our solutions show an interesting theological progression over several years, from You are betrothed to Joseph, to With God, nothing is impossible, and finally The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. To write a pageant script and then to direct it, is to sign on to a crash course not only in theology and liturgy, but also in child psychology, group dynamics, and management. To continue directing the Christmas pageant, year after year, is to be privileged to watch liturgy, tradition, and community take shape, grow, and bear fruit.

This book, therefore, has a long history, and represents the work of many people. Each of these three pageants was written for St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in New Haven, Connecticut, (now the Episcopal Church of St. Paul and St. James). I’d like to thank the clergy and people of this parish—now too numerous to list after more than twenty years—for putting up with my enthusiasms and my mistakes, and for their many kinds of help, support, and input all along the way. Still in a class by herself is Sherry Ellis, who is the author of the original pageant that I turned into Pageant Three, People, Look East, with her permission and blessing and (as always) generous help. Thanks also to my husband, Arnie, who has learned to live with the chaos brought about by my immersion in a nerve-racking, all-consuming project every year at what is supposed to be a season of peace and good will; and to the children who, year after year, have thrown themselves so eagerly into bringing to life whatever I have managed to dream up for them.

I am delighted that, sixteen years after this book first saw the light of day—typed on a manual typewriter and published under my own imprint—Church Publishing Incorporated has chosen to reissue it in a new format, complete with CD-ROM. My thanks are due to Frank Hemlin, Frank Tedeschi, and Marilyn Haskel for believing in this project, and to Johnny Ross for, once again, a fine partnership as editor. It’s my hope that these scripts will now reach many new congregations, and bring as much joy to you as they have to us.

INTRODUCTION

Each of the three pageants in this book was written for presentation as part of the main Sunday Eucharist on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, by a cast of some thirty-five children, grades K through 8, assisted, in Pageant Three, by a dozen or so adults and a few teens. All can be adapted to larger or smaller numbers of children merely by shrinking or swelling the three choruses: angels, shepherds, and sheep. We developed all three pageants on the following rehearsal schedule:

NOVEMBER: Introduce songs during regular Sunday school time.

ADVENT I & ADVENT II: Sunday school time devoted to rehearsal of speakers or readers and young instrumentalists (if any); younger children make props (Pageant Three), or continue with regular curriculum. The songs introduced in November continue to be used during Sunday school worship time.

ADVENT II: Participants stay after church for lunch and a run-through in the sanctuary. This rehearsal consists mainly of positioning and learning of cues, and leaves the director convinced that next week’s performance will be a complete disaster. Costumes are distributed, to be taken home, tried on, and worn to the final rehearsal.

SATURDAY BEFORE ADVENT IV: Dress rehearsal. For Pageants One and Two, this means running twice through the entire script, once with many stops for repetition or correction and once without any interruption. Pageant Three, however, is longer and more complex, and involves the entire eucharistic liturgy. Its dress rehearsal should therefore be organized differently. One effective plan is to begin by reviewing the carols, then work on the dance for the offertory carol; next, practice all the readings with their dramatic movements, and close with a thorough verbal review of all cues. The entire pageant will not be put together in order until the actual performance on Sunday morning.

ADVENT IV: Performance.

Extra, separate rehearsal time is, of course, needed if instrumental ensembles or small vocal groups are used. The director needs either to be very good at delegating authority (for costumes, props, communication with parents, etc.) or else to be prepared to spend several hours a day, seven days a week, for the three weeks or so immediately preceding the pageant. This is equally true of all three scripts, though the third, People, Look East, is the most ambitious and unwieldy. Even if the director has this much time to give, it is crucial to delegate some authority as the final preparations advance. Nothing is more inefficient and infuriating at the dress rehearsal than to have the director be the only one who knows the answer to all the questions everyone will have. Dozens of people can be kept waiting while the director dashes off to find something no one else can locate, or answers someone’s question or changes a detail. There is no misbehavior to match that of children, less than a week before Christmas, who are required to sit still and be silent for over an hour while the adult in charge works with someone else. Some of this kind of thing is unavoidable in any rehearsal situation; but careful planning and, above all, sharing the responsibility around, can make a big difference. As you may have guessed, this is one I’ve learned the hard way.

So why do a Christmas pageant? Why go crazy for a month right before Christmas when life (especially life with children and life in the Church) is crazy enough already? Sure, the kids look adorable in their costumes and the adults get lumps in their throats, but that alone does not even justify, let alone demand, the imposition into the parish liturgy of a ragtag piece of drama performed in barely audible voices by a crew of actors all less than five feet tall. Sure, we do it for the congregation, and the congregation eats it up. But we really do it for the children, and for the most unfrivolous of reasons: we are convinced that they learn more from the Christmas pageant than from everything else in Sunday school put together.

Except, maybe, for the Easter Pageant...¹

The most vivid and lasting educational experiences a child can have are those involving drama. Nothing else provides such a total immersion in the subject, such a meeting of it on its own terms. To work for weeks on a script—to hear its words again and again, and then to get inside it, and to be the means of setting its themes in motion; to get dressed up, and pretend, and to